I initially avoided this because Behringer yada yada but it's a great little device for having fun with music with my kids. The microphone preamps are really impressive even with mics like the SM57 and the sound comes through pretty clear. I have two reasonable complaints and one unreasonable/wishlist item.
Reasonable complaints:
- the device is ungrounded with a switch mode power supply and very noisy as a result. Even with just a microphone and a pair of headphones you can already hear mains hum. Connecting an electric guitar (via DI Box or directly) is catastrophic. Giving the board and source of grounding (like touching a metal connector or plugging the USB cable into your PC with a mains ground connection) massively improves the situation. But why couldn't they have spent an extra half euro or something for a grounded power supply option?
- some reviews mention a lack of rubber feet but mine actually came with a set which seem to have been thrown in the box as an afterthought. They have a hollowed out spot in the centre and are clearly designed to fit over the four screws on the bottom, which is thoughtful. The adhesive is terrible, though, and they fall off constantly. Without the feet the bottom of the device is uneven and wobbles from corner to corner. I think I'll try superglue.
And the unreasonable complaint: after you figure out the functionality of the "stream" buttons and their interaction with channel 7/8 you have a lot of really great possibilities for how to treat USB audio, but there's one thing that's not possible: you cannot hear both the USB audio and the main mix on the monitor channel without introducing the USB audio into the main mix itself. You either choose to hear the main mix (with or without USB) or *only* the USB "stream", without the main mix. That's annoying for a couple of reasons and eliminates one very obvious way of using the board, but fixing it would involve adding a second independent mixer just for the monitor channel, which would add some amount of cost, particularly when you could effectively use your computer as that mixer by having it reflect the input sound back at the output. So ya: very minor/unreasonable nag.
Otherwise a great product!
