Lindy USB Guitar Cable review

If you've ever felt that your electric guitar is trapped in the 20th century with its amp and 1/4in TRS connector then Lindy's USB Guitar Cable could be exactly what you need. It looks brilliantly simple: a thick 5m cable with a 1/4in jack on one end and a USB connector on the other.

The USB connector is actually a tiny USB sound card, which is instantly recognised as a USB audio device on every version of Windows, Linux and Mac OS X we tested. It's a welcome change from fiddling around with fragile 1/4in to 3.5mm conversion leads and line inputs.

Audio quality was excellent, beautifully capturing the warm tones of our guitar. It's a breeze to use with most PC guitar effects and audio editing software - we just had to select the device, which appears as a C-Media USB microphone, as our line input. Your usual audio device will handle the speak output as normal.

There was a very slight delay between hitting the string and hearing the tone through our speakers, due to latency issues with Windows' default driver, but this isn't a major problem. If it bothers you, both commercial and free low-latency Audio Stream Input/Output (ASIO) drivers are available for generic USB audio devices. However, we had difficulty using these on a test system that also had other USB audio devices, as they caused conflicts with our output device, which has its own ASIO driver.

Issues like this mean that that the USB Guitar Cable is better suited for practicing or recording rough tracks than for final production, but this isn't a major complaint, and it's priced accordingly. Whether you're practicing in your bedroom or laying down a demo track, this is a must-have for tech-savvy guitarists.

Author: Kat Orphanides