The routing in the UR816c is a bit fiddly, but I’ve more or less gotten the hang of it. Instead of connecting physical out buses to physical outputs, with the UR816c you connect “DAW Direct” outs (virtual output buses) to the physical outputs. So, DAW Direct out 1 to physical output #1, connected to the first channel in on the headphone amp, etc.
The drivers for the UR816c are superb. I can track 16 mono tracks and 8 stereo tracks (all just through a common input, but I don’t think that matters) at 48 samples (5ms round-trip latency) - all while playing a youtube video in the background, adjusting preferences, setting up key commands, checking and unchecking the “direct monitoring enabled/disabled” button - with no dropouts over about a 7 minute period.
The one thing that makes me crazy - and I hope they find a fix for it - is the routing with respect to the built-in FX. Let’s say you have a singer who wants some of the reverb in their phones. Fine… set up your input bus, enable the RevX reverb, monitor the singer in the control room… hear the singer and the Reverb… great. Nope. Singer says, “can you give me the reverb please?” The reverb (or whatever other FX, channel strip, whatever) - it seems - can ONLY be routed to a physical output - not a virtual output. That’s why I hear it in my monitors, but can’t route it to the phones.
At this point, I seem to need to do one of two things to employ a workaround, neither of which I never had to do with the MR816.
- Physically connect the headphone out on the UR816c to a headphone channel input on my headphone amp.
- Disable Control Room.
- Set up a talk-back channel manually so I can communicate with the singer.
OR
- Strap the reverb plugin into an insert on the channel. (obviously the easier of the two options, and surprisingly doable with the drivers and the shockingly small amount of latency that can be achieved.
CT