Steinberg UR22C Review - Did Steinberg improve the legendary UR22?

Hey, Julian Kraus here and not too long ago I reviewed the iconic Steinberg UR22 MKII. The UR22C is the direct successor, so let's have a look at how this new interface performs and see if Steinberg has improved it. First let's check out the build quality. The prior generation was known for its very robust build and that hasn't changed. The housing is still the same full metal construction, which makes the UR22C feel very sturdy. And that's also the reason this interface has quite some heft to it. The knobs on the front of the device turn smoothly and feel solid, with only the big volume knob having a slight wiggle to it. Even though you normally don't see inside the interface, I have to say that this also looks very good and you have to appreciate the little details like this small clamp which holds the cable in place and keeps it from flopping around. All in all, the solid metal housing in combination with the smooth and sturdy knobs make the UR22C feel like a quality product. Now on the front of the UR22C you can find the two gain knobs for the two audio inputs. These two inputs are XLR and TRS combo jacks. Above the inputs you can find four LEDs, two peak indicators which light up when the audio signal is clipping, one USB connection LED which turns on when the interface is connected to a PC and another LED which indicates if the phantom power for the two XLR inputs is turned on or off. Next to the gain knob for channel 2 you also find a high Z button which lets you toggle the TRS input on channel 2 between a line level and instrument input, so you can directly connect for example an electric guitar to the interface. New on the UR22C is the mono button which lets you decide whether you want to monitor input 1 on the left and input 2 on the right or if you like to listen to a mono mix of both inputs. Further to the right you also find a very handy knob which lets you dial in the exact amount of audio you will hear from the inputs of your interface compared to the audio coming from your DAW. Of course the UR22C also provides a headphone connector which in this case is a quarter inch jack connector and you can control the headphone volume with the volume dial above the connector. So the front of the UR22C is very similar to the UR22Mk2 but Steinberg made a few small tweaks. One of them is that they made the volume knob bigger and moved it more to the right outer edge, which I think is a wise choice as the knobs on the older model were a bit cramped. The UR22C's knobs are a bit easier to access. Oh, and the volume knob now lights up when the UR22C is powered on. On the back of the interface you can find two balanced quarter inch connectors for hooking up stuff like active studio monitors and the volume of these outputs is controlled by the big silver knob on the front, which we just talked about. You also find two MIDI connectors, one input and one output. To the left you have a small cutout where you can attach a high security Kensington lock. Below that you got the phantom power switch. I personally would have liked to see this switch on the front, because it is quite awkward to toggle the switch once you got everything connected and set up. On the far left on the back of the UR22C you got a USB Type-C connector, which is used to connect the interface to a PC or iOS device. As I already said in my Focusrite Scarlett review, I encourage manufacturers to use the new USB Type-C connector, so it's nice to see that Steinberg is going this route as well. And one more thing I want to point out is that this is a true USB 3.0 connection. Lastly, you can also find a micro USB connector, which can be used to power the interface if the device you connected the interface to does not provide enough power through the USB-C connection. This means that you should be able to use this interface with something like an iPad or even an iPhone. And of course you also got a switch, which lets you select whether the UR22C is powered via the USB connection or from the optional external power supply. Enough about the outside of the device, let's dive a little deeper into the specifications and see how the UR22C really performs. First up, sample rate and bit depth. The UR22C offers a sample rate of 192 kHz. This means that the interface can capture frequencies way above the human hearing range and you can see that in my frequency response measurement. The frequency response is very flat, with only some roll-off at the very extremes. The high sample rate might come in handy if you want to slow down a recording in post and pull the high frequencies back into the audible range. Of course, you can always record with a lower sample rate like 96k, 48k or 44.1k if you like. So far so good, but what struck me was the maximum sample rate of 32-bit. Many interfaces these days use 24-bit, which can theoretically hold a dynamic range of around 144 decibels, which is more than enough to capture the entire dynamic range of this audio interface. The dynamic range is the difference between the strongest and the smallest signal the interface can capture and you want this to be as big as possible. The UR22C is expected to have a dynamic range of the mic inputs of 102 decibels A-weighted and of course I measured the dynamic range of my particular unit, which was even a bit bigger, coming in at 102.9 dBA. That's a decent amount of dynamic range and roughly a 3 decibel improvement over the UR22Mk2. Although compared to other audio interfaces on the market, the dynamic range is a bit on the lower side. Still in practice, anything with a dynamic range of more than 100 dB will be plenty to work with. What still confuses me a bit is the 32-bit bit depth. When you have a look at the sound settings in Windows, the UR22C is reported with a bit depth of 24-bit and when you open up the ASIO control panel, there is no option to change the bit depth and there is also no indication whether the interface is running with 32 or 24 bits. In the end, it shouldn't really matter. As explained before, the 24-bit can easily hold the entire dynamic range of the UR22C and 32-bit shouldn't bring any improvement here. The only reason for the increased bit depth that came to my mind is that the 32-bits might be used in the internal DSP which can apply effects to your audio signal. Calculating digital effects with 32-bit can have an advantage because of the higher precision, but that's just pure speculation. Okay, let's have a look at the preamps of the UR22C. And for that I will switch to the Shure SM7B because this mic has a very low sensitivity, meaning that it needs a lot of gain, which brings out the noise of the preamps. Now I'm speaking into the SM7B and you can get a feeling of how the audio sounds like with this mic connected straight to the UR22C. To get a more scientific reading of the noise, I measured the so-called equivalent input noise of the UR22C, which lets you directly compare the noise of its preamp to preamps in other devices. The UR22C has an EIN of minus 123.3 dBuA weighted and this is a bit noisier than what I would have liked to see in such an audio interface. Here you can see the UR22C's preamps compared to other audio interfaces. The predecessor, the UR22MkII, did have the exact same amount of preamp noise and back when I did my review of this interface, I wasn't too impressed by the preamp noise and sadly that hasn't changed. Don't get me wrong here, an EIN of minus 123.3 dBuA is still okay and you can get low noise recordings, it's just that compared to other audio interfaces in this class, the preamps simply have a bit more noise. And here is what you can expect the noise floor to sound like when you connect a Shure SM7B directly to the UR22C. And here is how the noise of the UR22C compares to the noise of other audio interfaces. All recordings have been equally amplified in post to let you hear the noise more clearly, but other than that, there was no additional processing done. People always ask me if this interface can benefit from something like a Cloudlifter or Fethead. Yes, the UR22C can benefit from such a device and this can lower the preamp noise by up to 7dB. So if you are experiencing preamp noise with the UR22C, a Cloudlifter or Fethead might be the solution for you. Next up we'll have a look at the maximum system gain. If this is too low, you will max out your gain and still don't have enough gain to bring your recording to a proper level. The UR22C has a maximum system gain of around 49dBFS at 0dBu. And this means that you have plenty of gain even for low-sensitive dynamic mics. So all good. While I was on it, I also checked out the mic input impedance as this can have an effect on your sound if it is too low. But the UR22C has an input impedance of 3.9kΩ and that's totally fine. The round-trip latency is a measurement of how long the audio interface takes to put out a signal and record it again. The resulting number is a combined input and output latency. Of course, the latency heavily depends on the selected sample rate and buffer size. Here you can see the resulting round-trip latencies with a sample rate of 48k and here with 192kHz. I have to say, these are not the quickest times I have measured, but they are also far from being the worst. One thing I want to point out is that which buffer size you end up using depends on many factors like the hardware in your PC and also the number of effects in your project you're currently working on. So take these numbers more as a rough guideline to what's possible to achieve with the UR22C. Oh, and one more point. In the control panel you can actually see the input and output latency for a given setting. And I found these numbers to line up very well with my measurements. Now a big new feature of the UR22C is the internal DSP, which stands for Digital Signal Processing. This means that you can process your audio in the interface before the sound is even recorded. For example, the channel strip effect lets you dial in some compression and provides a simple graphic equalizer. Steinberg claims that the digital processing is done in real time. Of course, when I hear such a claim, I always wonder how much latency the processing really adds. So I fed a signal into the audio input on the UR22C, which you can see in yellow, and compared it to the signal coming from the headphone output, which was set to direct monitoring. That's the purple signal here. As you can see, the direct monitoring signal of the UR22C has a delay of about 115 microseconds. That's incredibly quick and of course much, much faster than processing the audio in the PC. As you can see, even the fastest round-trip latency was about 50 times longer. Suffice it to say that the internal DSP is doing the audio processing in real time, as there is no way you would ever hear this kind of delay. While making this video, I just noticed that the latency is dependent on the sample rate. Lower sample rates will yield in a higher latency. But even at 48kHz, the latency was never longer than half a millisecond, which is still much faster than processing the audio in the PC. I just wanted to mention it for the sake of completeness. I want to add that when I activated the channel strip effect, the direct monitoring delay slightly increased to about 130 microseconds. Again, this is an imperceivable amount of delay and it is neat to see all this processing done so quickly. Besides the compression and EQ, you can also find a high-pass filter or flip the phase. And of course, you can decide whether you want to record the unprocessed or processed signal with your DAW. There are a few more effects in the DSP software, which are guitar amp simulators. I think an amp sim is the perfect use case for the DSP technology, because it is completely calculated inside the UR22C, so there is no further processing needed on your PC. And as my measurements showed before, this is all done in real time. I think we talked quite a bit about the recording capabilities of the UR22C, but you might still ask yourself, how good is the headphone output? Well, I won't go into details here, as I'm going to release a video soon where I'm comparing the headphone amp quality of many different interfaces, so subscribe if you don't want to miss it. But I can say that the headphone output of the UR22C delivers audio with very low distortion and it has a good amount of power and it can drive even high impedance headphones to an adequate listening level. One thing that concerns me though is the high output impedance of about 91 ohms. This means that the UR22C is more suited to headphones with higher impedances, around 150 ohms and above. With the high output impedance of the UR22C's headphone output, the frequency response can change considerably when used with low impedance headphones, which in turn will color the sound. Many headphones these days are low impedance and that's why it's so unfortunate that Steinberg chose to go with such a high output impedance on the headphone amp. So low impedance headphones are not a good match for the UR22C when you strive for an accurate listening experience. Okay, let's sum this all up. I think the UR22C is a well-built audio interface which has a very robust feel to it. The 192 kHz sample rate allows you to record a wide range of frequencies even above the audible spectrum and the bit depth of 32-24 bit lets you capture a decent amount of dynamic range. But I must confess, with the new model, I would have liked to see a bigger improvement here. Don't get me wrong, on its own, the UR22C is a very capable audio interface. It's just when you compare it to other audio interfaces, you start to wish for a slightly better preamp and dynamic range performance. One thing I'm also not too fond of is the high impedance of the headphone output as this can lead to a change in frequency response when used with low impedance headphones. On the other hand, I really liked the integrated DSP of the UR22C which can apply effects in what is essentially real time. With this feature, you can process your audio with simple effects like compression and EQ even before you record the signal. I can imagine that this is a really handy feature for streamers which can use the DSP to process their voice in real time. This way, the audio will stay in sync with the video and there is no additional stress put on the CPU by any effects because it is all calculated inside the interface. And of course, the integrated guitar amp simulation can be very useful, too. Because there is no perceivable delay with the DSP, these effects should feel very responsive. Lastly, I want to point out that the whole audio for this video was of course recorded with the UR22C, so this should also give you a very good indication of what this interface is capable of. That's it for now, feel free to subscribe to my channel and please give me a thumbs up if you liked this video. I will see you all in the next one.