As already noted, the BCA2000 adopts the same outward appearance as the rest of the B-Control family: it comes in a compact plastic table-top box, slightly sloped, with a raised panel at the top, and is finished in a gun-metal blue-ish grey, with white highlights. On the top panel, the layout is clearly understandable, with the controls for the analogue inputs, configured as one mono and one stereo, dominating the lower panel. Though superficially simple, there’s more going on than you might think. First of all, the mono channel can route a mic-, line- or instrument-level input to your computer: the balanced line and balanced XLR mix inputs are at the rear of the interface, and there’s a high-impedance guitar input located handily on the front panel, just under the mono input controls. The three input choices are selected via a pair of buttons. The mono channel is equipped with a trim control and a 100mm level fader, plus a pan pot. A final switch activates 48V phantom power when using the XLR input with a condenser mic, whilst Signal and Clip LEDs keep you visually informed of audio moving through the channel and any overloading that might occur.

The mic-input electronics take the form of Behringer’s Invisible Mic Preamp (or IMPs), worthwhile circuitry inherited from the company’s UB mixer range. If the first thing you look for on computer audio interfaces is an insert point, in order to integrate your favourite hardware signal processing, then I’ll save you the time: the BCA is so-equipped. That’s a nice touch on an affordable interface.

At first glance, the stereo input channel looks pretty much like the mono, with its trim control, 100mm fader, simple metering, 48V switch and so on. But it has more cunning flexibility, with routing switches that let you choose a second line or mic input, in mono, or allow you to hijack both line inputs for true stereo operation. Making this choice does throw up some issues, however. For example, this channel’s pan pot works as a left/right balance control when working in stereo, and the mono input no longer has access to the (left) line input. It’s also not possible to apply insert processing to both sides of the stereo signal appearing at this channel, since the mono channel’s insert remains wired to its mic input. Thus it is possible to record a stereo performance, either miked or via the line ins, with insert processing, but only by setting the stereo channel for dual-mono operation. And although the BCA2000 can capture three analogue sources — one mono and the two sides of a stereo input — what goes to your audio software is always stereo. The theoretical three channels remain theoretical, and are always mixed to stereo.