Is UAD worth it?

[YYR123]

Yes all my sessions are at 44.1

[WernerF]

Originally Posted by YYR123

Yes all my sessions are at 44.1

Same here. We pretty much only make records, I know that that is a pretty low profit margin thing these days haha, and we see no sonic reason for ever going beyond that number. We would much rather have the horsepower that that sample rate provides. We also don’t hear a sonic difference between sample rates but that is a whole other debate. We also “mix as we go” which requires a DSP based DAW. It also informs the process, inspires the players and gives us a really good idea about what is working and what isn’t. This requires having the ability to put a limiter on the master buss which is not possible to do in the Apollo mixer, even if you were willing to go back and make a new mix in Pro Tools once you were done tracking with the UAD stuff. We don’t know about anyone else but in our world there is simply no money in the budgets to pay for the time that it takes to do things twice.

[YYR123]

Originally Posted by WernerF

We don’t know about anyone else but in our world there is simply no money in the budgets to pay for the time that it takes to do things twice.

This is true

[TNM]

Originally Posted by PatriotsBiker

Thanks again for the tips, folks. And for the link to the usage chart. I can see when I got to 20% in a hurry. The 610B does not look all that light. That's my 20% right there, and would not surprise me if I tried to load up some mix busses inside PT with the same thing. Dble up to 96K when it happened and that would have done it. Probably need to go back down to 48k, but that's a whole other topic.

I'll do some math on the rest and go from there.

really.. as far as i am aware the 610 is an upsampled plugin and they get same instance counts at any usable SR.

[sdmaas]

Originally Posted by mikeyman

are you talking about running the UA plugins from a PCI-e card?

For "DSP" HD/HDX plugins was what I meant...

As far as comparisons go, UAD kills Waves on LA-2A, 1176, and Pultec EQ. Since those are the only duplicates I own, those are the only ones I can comment on...but I am sure the list is much longer. Like I said before, I will use the CLA-1176 (DSP) while recording for the needy vocalists, but nothing on the printed channel.

[mikeyman]

thanks for the advice on the UAD-1 card guys .Ill stay away from that.I thought the CLA bluey was good for my lead voice but I never used any other plugs or the real hardware so I have nothing to compare it to.I am more interested in the better plugs that UA has to offer.If i'm going to get a UAD-quad card i'd like to try the best plugs they have.

[abc1mce2]

Originally Posted by PatriotsBiker

Forgive me if I get the vernacular wrong for this question.
How many of the "DSP processors" (or SHARC processors?) would you or someone need to run somewhere near 50 UAD plugs, including some on the mix-bus, to tun smoothly and a bit of room to spare? (I know there are a lot of variables. Just looking for a starting point number.)

At this point I wouldn't get anything but a Octo UAD2 because alot of the newer plugins seems to use more and more DSP which means you get less and less plugins per card.

[PatriotsBiker]

Originally Posted by abc1mce2

At this point I wouldn't get anything but a Octo UAD2 because alot of the newer plugins seems to use more and more DSP which means you get less and less plugins per card.

That's exactly what my math came up with if I were to use moderate DSP eaters everywhere on mid-size sessions with some sub-group busses, etc.

[noiseboyuk]

(May regret posting this...)

I have an Octo and a bunch-o-plugs, bought mainly for compatibility with shared projects with a colleague. They are all very good. But I'm far from convinced they are the only good game in town. Most debates online seem to revolve around comments like "XXX from Waves is terrible = UAD is better". It's usually massively simplistic to pit a single A v B and draw wildly-sweeping conclusions from it.

This is the bit I'll be flayed alive for. I always suspected - and still suspect - there is a psychological component to UAD's popularity. Based on two elements - 1) by licensing exact GUI replicas and names, it has a great comfort feeling and 2) by having a hardware component, it feels more substantial than mere code that lives on your rig. None of this is to suggest that UAD make poor plugins - pretty much uniformly I find them great. But in the main they focus on old analogue emulations to which other plugins might do an equally good job in practice, regardless of whether or not they are based on a particular model of hardware. If you must have the exact sound of a particular EQ or preamp then fine, but if you just want something that does the same job and sounds good, then your options widen considerably.

If you're a self-contained studio with a powerful system, you'll have plenty of non-DSP options that are very good. I've been fairly surprised at how fast you can fill up an Octo, so in the main I'm being fairly choosy about what UAD plugs I use - if there's an equivalent native plug I'll likely pick that, reserving the UADs for when they'll really make a difference. I've also been surprised that they still add to latency as much as they do (as much discussed in this thread), naively I thought that offloading to dedicated DSP would mean they were very lean on my main rig, which isn't always the case.

In summary - UAD are terrific, though they seem to be predominantly focused on endlessly re-creating past glories rather then being innovative. If you use a mobile Apollo rig where you can plug and play in other studios for example so you know exactly where you are and can get a familiar setup going in minutes, it makes perfect sense. But I'm not convinced they are are streets ahead of everything else - look at what you need on a case-by-case basis and you can probably find equally valid non-DSP alternatives.

(ducks)

[deanrichard]

I won't be one of those flaying you, and I use UAD myself. I have no doubt using familiar analog emulations gives a strong comfort level, especially to long time engineers who have used the HW. It's human nature. I also believe that making the UI identical, or nearly so, has a strong psychological effect.

Originally Posted by noiseboyuk

(May regret posting this...)

...
This is the bit I'll be flayed alive for. I always suspected - and still suspect - there is a psychological component to UAD's popularity. Based on two elements - 1) by licensing exact GUI replicas and names, it has a great comfort feeling and 2) by having a hardware component, it feels more substantial than mere code that lives on your rig. None of this is to suggest that UAD make poor plugins - pretty much uniformly I find them great. But in the main they focus on old analogue emulations to which other plugins might do an equally good job in practice, regardless of whether or not they are based on a particular model of hardware.
...
(ducks)