The UCA202 is a nice little feature-packed device. When plugging it into a Windows xp machine, a generic usb audio driver automatically installs and Windows sets the UCA202 as the primary sound device. This is the driver I'm using for general purpose pc sound output directly to powered pc speakers via the headphone 1/8" out and simultaneously as a usb to spdif converter via toslink for the dac on the cambridge audio 840c for my headphone setups. I'm using this driver because I'd like to actually hear sound (especially in games) and other applications for which there is no way to directly access the device through asio. Read on...
I installed the ASIO driver available for download at Behringer.com, however it strangely removes the UCA202's ability as a general device for sound output in Windows. Instead you can set up individual applications, like for example foobar, to use asio directly to the UCA202. While I couldn't directly a/b the generic usb audio driver vs the asio driver, I found the sound through asio to be noticeably less grainy. But of course this is somewhat useless to me since I can't use the UCA202 for gaming or other tasks with the ASIO driver (which requires a reboot whenever installing/uninstalling).
The ASIO4all driver might be an option. I've used that before with the dac in the Corda Aria for foobar specifically. In this case, the Aria's dac was setup as a generic usb audio device with the default windows driver so it could be used for all sound output (like in games too
) and the asio4all driver was only used within foobar as an output option. While foobar was running, no other sounds (from another application for eg) would output but as soon as foobar was closed, any windows sound would be output. I haven't tried the asio4all driver with the UCA202 yet.
How does it sound as a usb to spdif device?
When flac encoded files are sent via toslink to the Cambridge audio 840c, the sound is not bad, but not exactly in the same league as the source redbook cd playing in the 840c. Strange considering they are using the same dac, no?
But honestly, the difference in sound is so noticeable that I would have to be highly suspect of someone's hearing if they couldn't tell a different. The neat thing with this type of comparison is that no volume adjustments are needed to level match so you can really just choose either the redbook or spdif input and make some judgements. The spdif input is noticeably grainy, lacking in imaging and separation, and generally sounds a bit wooly across the entire frequency range
when directly compared to the redbook. Just as a little tidbit, the display on the 840c shows the spdif input as <=20/44.1 (which gets upsampled to 24/384).
While my observations might make you reconsider... remember that this device sells for ~$30 and completely blows away the sound quality of the Creative Soundblaster Live card. It's pretty good, but certainly not the final word in pc audio. It sounds great for gaming though
