Yes and no.

Yes …. but no.

It’s pro-am quality.

I’m not about to have a soundproof, suspended box built inside the room … spend £10,000 on studio monitors, £1,000 per cable … or anything like that.

But, for the level I’m working at, it’s more than adequate for my purposes: if I ever need to send my stuff for professional mastering then the only problems with the material will be of my own doing, not because I was using shoddy kit, flung together without concern for whether the end product sounded professional … it won’t sound like a bunch of drunk teens got together in a basement and recorded the first time they ever touched an instrument or mixing desk — however crap it might be compositionally, it won’t be an embarrassment from the engineering perspective.

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But … I haven’t bought the RB-UL2 yet … it’s only the first part of the equation.

A friend, who’s a producer/masterer, found it after about six months of assiduously searching.

Think about that: someone who knows what’s what kit-wise took six months. actively searching for that very solution, to find it … when, given how obvious a use case it is for anyone who needs to connect a device (or even simply input) with an unbalanced output to their studio, you’d think they were ten a penny, wouldn’t you?

So … whilst I’m convinced it should be obvious that there should be a A/D box out there that takes a balanced input and forwards it on as an optical signal, I’m holding fire on it until I’m sure there is — I’ve found any number of boxes that will take an unbalanced audio input and send it on … noise signature and all … but why would I want to transmit the noise signature at all, let alone go to the lengths of converting it to digital first?

Moreover, I’m not holding my breath that there’s an S/PDIF to ADAT converter either; once again, whilst I’m sure that, when it’s pointed out to you how utterly unfathomable it is that it isn’t commonplace, you’ll grin sheepishly and say “Dur … yip … dunno why nobody nevver fort o’ dat b’fore” … it seems to me that it’s simply too obvious for any of you morlocks to have thought of by yourselves — after all … why would anyone ever need to connect two devices with different connectors together? *sigh*

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So, I’m excited to know it exists … because I have some kit I need to connect to the audio interface, so that I can record from it ¹, and the ai doesn’t have any kind of TRS (let alone balanced) connections, never mind XLR ports, so the only output I can take from the mixer is the unbalanced RCA pair.

Sooner or later, (hopefully ²) I’ll get a new breakout box and that will have some sort of balanced In ports (TRS or XLR), but the RB-UL2 will still be useful under those circumstance because I’ll still be able to use it to send a balanced output from the mixer to my amp for general listening — when I’m listening to music for pleasure, gaming or watching a film … I don’t want to hear earth loop hum then either.

But I’ll hold on until I know exactly how useful it’s gonna be. If I can’t find a balanced audio to ADAT converter … or balanced audio to S/PDIF and S/PDIF to ADAT converters … then I’ll be better off spending the money on a new breakout box first — cleaning up the signal from the mixer to the amp would be nice, but it’s not essential in the way cleaning up the signal from the mixer to my laptop is (if noise is added to the final production when I play it, it’s undesirable but que sera sera … but if the material is noisy to begin with then it’ll never sound clean on anything).

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¹ CDJs, games consoles, Blu-Ray player, that kind of thing.

² Again, it’s one of those things that’s so obvious, it’s almost certain none of you halfwits has ever thought of it.