Radial Engineering USB-Pro Stereo USB Laptop DI

This makes my live setup so much easier and sounds great!!

The Radial USB-Pro Stereo USB laptop DI box works great. I use it to run .wav files from a laptop through my tube compressor into my DAW with zero quality loss. (unlike using the high impedance out of a headphone jack which is a very noticeable loss in dynamic range and overall sound.) The beautiful part of the process is the drivers seem to be included in this device and when I plugged it in to my Windows 7 64bit laptop the device just worked. I am very happy with Radial products and have a handful of their di boxes. I will continue to use their products as they are solid, transparent and reliable.

I'm a huge fan of Radial products normally, but this one seems to miss the mark. The Radial USB-Pro works great in some situations, no software needed, easy to use, built tough, but it requires power from the device connected. All Apple mobile products sense when a device is connected and tries to draw power and immediately gives an error message and won't let it connect. You can get around this by buying an adapter that allows you to connect both to the device and a power source, but now you've got a mess of cables and connections. I've also experienced audio drop outs on the right channel. At first I blamed it on the devices connected, I'd unplug the USB cable, reconnect and everything would work great again. 6 months later of still struggling with periodic drop outs, I noticed that if I wiggled the cable close to the Radial USB-Pro, the right audio track would come back. I replaced the cable thinking maybe it was damaged, but the problem continues (I'm also uncertain how a digital signal could possibly drop one side of the audio due to a "bad" cable). For non critical playback, or mono playback it works, but I can't trust this for anything important. This is not like all of my other Radial products which are rock solid decades later. I'm contacting Radial to see if anything can be done to make this more reliable, but in the mean time, I've purchased a Sonnect Soundwire with hopes of a simpler and more reliable solution to my playback demands. UPDATE Radial support reached out with multiple suggestions on how to diagnose the problem. Embarrassingly enough, the problem with dropouts was likely caused by the XLR cable I was using. 1 week after replacing the XLR cables used, I've not had any dropouts. As I've said before, I'm a huge fan of Radial Engineering, the only downside now is the power injection problem when using Apple products.

Super easy macOS setup: Find a USB cable (it's not included) and plug it in. This is USB powered so no additional power is needed. Open up "System Preferences" then click on "Sound". Under "Select a device for sound output:" select "Radial USB Pro Output" and that's it. There are no drivers to install. Sounds great. There's plenty of gain even for the most stubborn headphones.

This Radial DI Box is built solidly and worked perfectly right out of the (cardboard) box for my media server.