Rob Puricelli
September 13, 2008

Rating: 10/10

Well, so far, I am utterly impressed by this tiny bundle of fun. It is indeed very slim, and the half action keys take a little getting used to, but they are very capable and a tweak of the velocity curve had things ringing true very quickly. It feels light yet substantial and the sockets and connections at the rear are flush, firm and snug fitting. Also, the knobs and slider feel very good to use. Not loose, not tight, just....well, kinda right :o) I guess that man they pay to make sure that knobs and buttons \"feel\" right in use is a worthwhile investment. Thank you Lo Zhan ! ;o)

Not a vast deal more I can say about the keyboard as it is a simple affair but the Behringer ASIO driver (a derivative of the Ploytec USB Audio driver which I have used before with great success on my Event EZbus) installed first time and instantly provided 7ms stable playback latency. It was just great to have a full blown Reason track playback with no crackles on my work laptop that is designed more for running business apps than music stuff. EmulatorX & Proteus VX were handled with consumate ease too.

It\'s been an overall joy to install and use ! I immediately found an error in the manual though. They refer to a table that lists the preset templates included with the UMA25S but that table doesn\'t exist. I dropped Behringer support an email late last night and had a reply waiting for me when I logged on this morning ! How\'s that for service ! They are sorting it as a matter of urgency :o) I don\'t mind mistakes. What I mind is when a company abdicates responsibility for them. No sign of that happening here, I\'m pleased to say.

The supplied gig bag is nicely padded, the headset is functional and sounds pretty good and the straps are more of a gimmick, but they do what they set out to do :o)

Hats off to Behringer once more for delivering a simple, robust product at an amazing price ! Oh, did I mention that whilst I paid £79.99 for mine, Digital Village have now dropped the price to £67.99 ! An amazing deal ! When I spoke to them last week, I was told that they had received 8 pallets full of these babies and only one unit was available for sale as all the others were already sold. I\'m not surprised !

Well, the real proof is in the long term performance of this thing, and you can be sure to hear about that from me ;o)