Edirol UA3FX USB Audio Interface

 High quality digital recording that just works right!
Finally, the product I've been looking for... The Edirol UA-3FX is manufactured by Roland, a company known for high-quality electronic musical instruments. This external audio capture device doesn't disappoint. It's easy to setup and use and it simply works correctly, without a lot of special software or nightmarish driver configurations.

I bought the UA-3FX in order to record digital audio from the optical input and to copy that same data to the optical output, unaltered, so that it can be played by the speakers (Logitech Z-5500). I originally looked at the Edirol UA-1D, but a phone call to Edirol tech support confirmed that the UA-3FX was the right choice because it offers full duplex digital optical input and output while the UA-1D does not.

I purchased this box to replace a Turtle Beach Catalina card which after only 3 months had developed a horrible noise problem on the digital circuit -- sometimes only on output but sometimes the noise got recorded, too. I was becoming suspect of $49 sound cards but I didn't want to spend $260 for a Creative card with a bunch of spyware and 5 pieces of driver software. A bit of poking around on the web turned up the Edirol name, and I'm very happy that it did.

The first thing you'll notice about this box is ease of installation. It simply works, out of the box. There's no fancy driver to setup or patchbay interface to learn, everything is controlled by physical switches on the box itself -- very intuitive and easy to manage.

The box comes with a high resolution driver which can be turned on or off by flipping a switch. This allows 24 bit recording if your applications support it. My UA-3FX works flawlessly w/ TimeTrax and MusicMatch in this advanced mode and, since these are just standard Windows applications, I would imagine that many applications will work in advanced mode without any special setup. Perhaps more important is the ability to flip the advanced driver switch OFF and just use the standard USB sound driver that's built into Windows XP. This is huge because Microsoft will continue to support this standard driver long into the future, making it easy to continue to use the UA-3FX through many years of Windows upgrades and patches. It also makes it easy to move the box between machines if you need to.

The package claims that the UA-3FX can be used as an effects processor for recording or performance. I sampled a few of these effects with the digital input just to try them out. The 'karaoke' effect (center cancel) is weak at best, so don't buy it for that. The other effects are aimed at improving analog recordings and they may help if your original source is noisy or damaged, but I did not test the analog inputs.

I simply plugged in my optical input and output cables, started my recording software, and turned on my speakers. And voila, it worked. This is how computer hardware should be. There were no special settings necessary in order to make my software understand the recording and playback parts. While this sounds obvious, a little experimentation with any of the other audio cards on the market will tell you it isn't that simple. Most cards have complicated driver software and some even require opening the control panel in order to switch from recording to playback on digital inputs. Not this box. It's literally plug-and-play.

After dealing with nightmarish setups, too many patchbay options and noisy, unreliable soundcards, I was definitely ready for the UA-3FX. If you want to make flawless, high quality digital recordings from almost any source and reproduce those recordings in the same digital format, the UA-3FX delivers the performance you need in a package that's easy to setup and use. Highly recommended.

-- D