LinuxMusicians

I just found out about the new Roland Rubix 24 sound card. It's USB audio class compliant and all the functionality is controllable with knobs and switches on the hardware, so it should be fully compatible with Linux. I haven't heard one of these myself, but the specs look on par with the Focusrite Scarlett 2i4 so I presume it sounds quite good. For the same price as the Scarlett 2i4, this has a few neat advantages. It has a hardware compressor for the inputs, so the inputs can be compressed while using direct monitoring. Plus, it can also run standalone from USB power (a cell phone charger) without a computer. I think this will be the sound card I generally recommend now (and not just for Linux users).

There's also the Rubix 22 with 2 less outputs and no hardware compressor and the Rubix 44 with two more inputs.

Has anyone tried these? Were there any quirks setting it up with Linux or was it plug-and-play? How do they sound?

I have the same question 'bout the Behringer 404HD. It's cheaper and also has multiple out via USB. Might that be an alternative for you?

Behringer makes bad sounding gear that breaks quickly. That's why it's so cheap.

Be. wrote:Behringer makes bad sounding gear that breaks quickly. That's why it's so cheap.

I'd contest this. It may be true in many cases, but we use an X32 mixer which we are dearly in love with. It's a great live mixer and tons of bang for your buck. The Midas style preamps sound very clean and neutral and we use them for recording with great success (albeit nowdays with additional character preamps in front on some channels). The build quality seems good, we have the mixer for 3-4 years and it still has to fail us.

Certainly even if designed by Midas it won't be the same quality, but one would really have to work hard to find fault with it.

Be. wrote:Has anyone tried these? Were there any quirks setting it up with Linux or was it plug-and-play?

If it's a class compliant device then it should be plug and play. I reckon this device is kind of the successor to the UA-25(EX), those were awesome so I bet these Rubix interfaces are great too.

Be. wrote:Behringer makes bad sounding gear that breaks quickly. That's why it's so cheap.

Behringer has made a lot of crap (remember those cheap platsic guitar stomp boxes?) but they also make very sturdy, good sounding gear. I've got a BCR2000 and a BCF2000 and those are still great devices. Recently I bought an ADA8200 which is just so much bang for the buck, almost unbelievable.

I just got a rubix44 and it works fine on linux. All switches hardware. Coming up as standard audio device and I seem to have all possible sample rates and resolutions available. Not much to report yet except one minor annoyance: it will stay awake for 10 hours after the computer turns off with a bright light blinking away. The hardware off switch is tiny and hard to get to on the back. I guess roland thinks that pro-hardware people don't want their audio equipment to do an auto-shutdown...

Anyway, at this stage, I would definitely recommend this hardware for linux.

...the slightly more aggravating side of this 'feature' is that after ten hours the rubix44 goes to sleep and computer activity won't wake it. This means your jack autostart will fail. The solution is that you have to power off / power on using the poorly located manual switch. And take jack out of your autostart programs in case you forget to turn the unit on (or off and on again) before booting.

I still don't regret buying it. I am running it on 88000 or so MHz and I get 3-8% CPU use on my Ryzen 1700 mid range computer.

I had looked at the Behringer UMC1820, but although the bang for the buck looks great, I was put off by a previous experience with poor QC on their part. I think if you get a good piece of equipment, Behringer is a great buy, you just may have to go thru a return or two to get it. I'm trying the Rubix44 to replace my firewire interface, a Saffire Pro 24DSP. I'm still using the Saffire, but only on MacOS-based gear. It's just not worth the amount of time I've spent getting mediocre support for a legacy Firewire device on Linux.

I need to buy a USB audio interface with 4 mic inputs with 48+ phantom power that will work troublefree with Linux.

What is important to me besides that is that the audio quality is good and especially that the mic preamps sound good and are very low-noise as I plan to do also classical music recordings with it. I think the Roland Rubix 44 and the Tascam US-4x4HR could probably fit the bill.

Can anybody share his or her experience with the Roland Rubix series in this regards and also the Tascam US-HR-series (US-2x2HR or US-4x4HR). If someone has even compared those two and report about it that would be a dream )

I'm going to get the Roland right now! I will test it tonight with Mixxx on a party, and Bitwig tomorrow, as a live sound card.

Don't buy Behringer ANYTHING ever!

• they are eating/consolidating the music industry.
• they do ripoffs of other peoples designs/ don't invest in R&D (Mackie, Roland, etc, ALL their circuits are RIPOFF designs! Support real design)
• they bought CoolAudio a chip company JUST to ripoff Curtis Semiconductors the maker of the original CEM3340 oscillator-on-a-chip
  (WHY do you think you see all these 'new' Behringer products directly copying old 80's ROLAND products that went out of patent coverage!?)
• they threaten people who review their products badly (Uli Behringer has several legal cases pending on this)
• their entire operational philosophy is "make it cheaper, kill the competition/actual innovators, copy their designs and swoop in on their suppliers)

Don't make the mistake of thinkng "what do I care, it's cheap, therefore good for me" because that is what is making the world worse.
Invest in what you believe in.

vectorselector wrote: ↑Fri Jun 16, 2023 9:58 am

I'm going to get the Roland right now! I will test it tonight with Mixxx on a party, and Bitwig tomorrow, as a live sound card.

Don't buy Behringer ANYTHING ever!

• they are eating/consolidating the music industry.
• they do ripoffs of other peoples designs/ don't invest in R&D (Mackie, Roland, etc, ALL their circuits are RIPOFF designs! Support real design)
• they bought CoolAudio a chip company JUST to ripoff Curtis Semiconductors the maker of the original CEM3340 oscillator-on-a-chip
  (WHY do you think you see all these 'new' Behringer products directly copying old 80's ROLAND products that went out of patent coverage!?)
• they threaten people who review their products badly (Uli Behringer has several legal cases pending on this)
• their entire operational philosophy is "make it cheaper, kill the competition/actual innovators, copy their designs and swoop in on their suppliers)

Don't make the mistake of thinkng "what do I care, it's cheap, therefore good for me" because that is what is making the world worse.
Invest in what you believe in.

But iin contrast to the Rubix I had the UMC just works..