Old 2192 video

And today, it's still a great sounding interface~!

Really loved the 2192's, still great freaking units. I've seen a few come up for sale for like peanuts a couple of times and thought about it, but I feel like these are ticking time bombs at this point as far as repairability. I seem to remember reading some things about not being able to get a few of the parts any more. I'm kind of surprised UA hasn't done a plugin of it yet 

Around 10 years ago, I sent in a 2192 because it had a noisy channel.  It took me almost a year to get it back.  I never found out what was wrong with it.  In between, there were dozens of emails without reply, and phone calls with no resolution or answers.  

I can’t imagine getting one fixed now.

ms-tas.com/universal-audio-2192-review/

This guy does repair on 2192s too.

Great to hear somebody is willing to repair. I got paranoid because of that and sold mine. Always regretted that. Nothing sounds like it and its one of the best clocks I have ever heard.

Curious, did you send it to burl ?

Correct. It's why the Burls are of interest to me now. Rich Williams knows what he is doing, when it comes to conversion.

I see them for under $1k every once in a while (https://reverb.com/item/85021434-universal-audio-2192-ad-da?show_sold=true). I saw the link to the repair techs thorough review above. Lots of interesting information, but a lot of the technical "defaults" listed about it not taking loud signals well, are what actually make it sound so good in my experience. I used to clip mixes through it to get things louder, sounded really great and broke up really musically. I feel like the 2192 was the pinnacle of design and balance between really transparent and really musical. Things didn't really get any better after that, companies either committed to making things more transparent and "technically" perfect, or we got offshoots like Burl going the other direction and focusing on just sounding good.


Not really a lot of in-between anymore, which is a bit depressing. You've got some outliers like JCF, but the workflow and integration is pretty inconvenient. Quite expensive as well. I remember really liking the first generation silverface Apollo's quite a bit, they sounded musical and had the same pedigree as the 2192. The blackface ones came out and I hated them, gladly stuck with the Silverfaces. The X series came out and although I still didn't think they sounded anywhere close to musical, they were clearly more accurate and exposed a lot of harshness issues I was having in the top end.

I've felt like for the last 5 years, we've hit the law of diminishing returns with converters. They all sound pretty much the same to me, they all sound really good. I can hear differences when I occasionally get the chance to compare, but the differences I hear don't really matter enough to me to have a strong opinion. A lot of people were either not around in the really early 2000's or have just forgotten how much of a difference there was between something like an M-Box and a nicer rack unit. MASSIVE difference, and companies like Black Lion really helped the little guys like me afford something that was professional and useable. Everything sounds technically good now, I wish a company would pop up that focused on (affordable) mojo and tone for their converters and making something musical as oppose to touting the same worthless stats everyone else does.

UA would be the perfect people to pick up the mantle and revive something like the 2192, but they're not that company any more. We get the "Vibe" button on the Volt interfaces now. I think the closest thing we still have (that sounds great and was WAY before it's time) is Heat in ProTools. Still a solid choice, I was playing around with it a few days ago and was surprised how great it sounded. 

Yes, Rich designed the 2192 for UA...and did a damn good job at that.

He stated that when he started his own company, Burl, he addressed everything that he thought was wrong with the 2192 and released the B2 Bomber.

I mean, what else would he say?

The fact is, even if that's true, the 2192 is quite a great convertor, especially for the $ !
And it does love to be hit hard.

I'm right there with you.  UA had such a winner with the 2192, but that's not what UA is about anymore.  I'm really hoping these new Burls work out.  I could never afford or justify spending the kind of money that it would have cost to pick up 32 or even 16 channels of I/O of the green line of Burl modules, but these new 16 channel Black series cards are something I can swing (barely).  That said, they're still not cheap.  The B16 chassis, plus a 16 channel AD card and a 16 channel DA card is over $7k, though the current sale does knock off a decent little chunk.  So I guess it depends on how you define "affordable".  I'll only be picking up 16 channels of I/O for now.  We'll see how that goes, and then maybe I'll pick up another 16 channels in another year or two.

Other than for mix bus monitoring, I'd probably always choose a little color/vibe over strictly transparent, and I agree with you that the 2192 hit that target really well.  The 2192 on guitars, for example?  Damn it sounds good.  I haven't used the new Burl Black series, so we'll see how it goes.  It'll be an experiment.  I didn't hate the sound of my X16 Apollos.  They were fine.  But they didn't wow me either.  Which, again, was fine, if a converter "trying" to be transparent was what you wanted.  But if I had a choice, I would prefer something that sounds musical versus strictly transparent.  We know it's possible because we've had the 2192 to see what IS possible.  The Burl green line comes highly touted, so I'm hoping to have a good experience with the Black line.

The problem with "affordable" conversion that also has vibe, and isn't strictly transparent, is that I think what we associate with having vibe, at least in the case of converters, is as much about getting them to not sound "digital" and take something away, as it is about getting them to sound "analog" and add something to the sound.  I mean, we all have transformer based preamps that we use prior to our "transparent" converters, but why do we still end up with things sounding digital?  I think that's the secret sauce that the 2192, the Burls and the JCF have going for them.  Radar too, I suppose.  It's not about adding analog sounding color so much as it is about getting things to not sound digital and lesser than.  And to do that, takes a more costly design, unfortunately.  So there is probably a floor on what can be done affordably, and still achieve those goals.  Maybe not though.  I don't know.

I don't claim to know a whole lot about what is going into the design of the Burls or JCF or the 2192, but I have read that all of these designs very much intentionally are trying to remove a lot of the electronics prior to the converter chip itself, and/or ask the electronics that remain to do as little heavy lifting in the gain department as possible, in large part because of what those electronics do to the phase relationship of the signal.  In the case of the Burls, that is achieved by using a transformer to (transparently as possible) do some of the gain increase, as well as using parallel (I think) discrete opamps to do the rest of the gain.  Divide and conquer, if you will.  Multiple smaller gain stages instead of one single SMD opamp, as typical, being asked to do it all.  There are also no capacitors involved, I believe, which also helps with the phase aspect.  So, with that design philosophy, you get less taken away, and things are therefore MORE transparent, not less.  

The bonus of all of this being that, IF you DO drive more signal into it, and the circuit starts to react in a non linear fashion, it distorts in a pleasant musical way because of the class A discrete electronics and the transformer, versus a $2.00 SMD opamp.  The use of the transformer and discrete opamps I think may unfairly characterize in people's minds that this sort of design is inherently colored.  It is if you drive signal into it, but it isn't necessarily so colored if you're more conservative on levels.  This is how I've felt about the 2192, and it's how I understand the Burls to also behave.  It's the best of both worlds, if you ask me.

So, like I said, as I understand it, the Burl stuff actually IS quite transparent (in a musical way) unless you gain it up.  I don't know how the JCF reacts to higher levels of gain, but I think it has overall similar design principles.  Same for the 2192.  And that is the sort of thing I'm looking for.  I've got a bunch of great preamps, mics, compressors, etc. that I feel like are capable of giving me plenty of vibe and color, but I've still always felt like there was just something that was "lesser than", after conversion with typical converters, but not necessarily my 2192.  So who knows, it's possible that I get these new Burls in for a while, and decide the they don't do the thing that I hope they will, but if the 2192 design philosophy is any indication of what I can expect with the Burls, I'm optimistic that, even if the tone is slightly different between the 2192 and Burls, the end result will still be the same as that which I've been able to get with the 2192, and that's recorded tracks which don't sound "digital" or lesser than, like they do when I've recorded with the Apollos.  The vibe/color thing would just be a bonus, I think.  I suspect I would be inclined to actually bring conservative levels into the Burls, as opposed to intentionally driving into them all that much.

But I'll continue to drive guitars into the 2192.  That shit sounds great.

Nope, sent it to UA.

This is awesome but just like the problematic TC single space SMPS I’m kind of surprised nobody has offered an upgraded outboard beefier regulated linear supply!