Universal Audio In Trouble

[James Steele]

Originally Posted by M2E

You guys are killing me here. LOL
How do you not talk about the overall percentage when talking about a system and how good or bad it is and just base everything on one chip and what it can do and can't?
That doesn't make any sense! NONE! Unless you use and have a one card DSP system. Not judging...LOL

Marc... with all due respect, I initially was simply confused by your statement. Again, I'll repeat myself. You said: "The heaviest plugin was the Lexicon 480L taking up 16% on one chip of a quad."

I think anyone who has some proficiency in English understood that to mean exactly what it says. There's no ambiguity there. No biggie... it may have been a typo or whatever. In fact, on my system, the UAD 480L takes up 58% of "one chip."

Someone else explained far better than I did why this "single chip percentage" is so important. You can't span a plug across more than one chip so it limits the number of instances of certain plug-ins you can run at once. I have a TB3 Satellite OCTO. If I blindly looked at the "total power" I'd say "Well... I have 800 available. The 480L uses 58. 800 divided by 58 is 13.79. I should be able to run 13 instances of UAD 480L on my OCTO." But the real answer is 8 instances. For any plug that uses 51% or more of a SHARC chip, the maximum number of simultaneous instances that can be run are equal to the number of SHARC chips at your disposal. It's that simple.

I was not trying to bash the UAD products. I wouldn't have bought a brand new TB3 Satellite OCTO for over $1K less than a year ago if I thought they sucked. People were just rightfully and objectively pointing out one limitation of the hardware DSP. And honestly, the confusion arose with a statement you made that was technically incorrect. It may have been a typo as I said, but my understanding of the English language took it to mean exactly what it meant. If you really had a secret to getting the UAD 480L to "take up 16% on one chip," I honestly wanted to know how! I'd be thrilled to get 6 instances per chip, or 48 instances total out of my OCTO!

Words are important. A couple were missing so it was confusing.

[simon.a.billington]

Originally Posted by M2E

Hey Simon, maybe it's because I've only had my UAD system for a year and a half now but, the UAD chips are more than enough for me as long as you have a great computer (New Mac M1 chips). True, you have to get more cards, I've mentioned this on Gearspace, I have yet to run out of CPU power and I only have 5 Quad cards (3 Satellites and 2 PCIe cards). If you need more cards/power, get more or save up to get more. The reason I got so many is because I kept hearing this fallacy about UAD plugins take up all this power and I was like, I better get a lot of power on the front end.
I received my first QUAD satellite and pulled up plugins and I agree, one will not do it at all. Once I received the other units and saw how they implement the power, it all made sense and I had more power than needed for now.
The heaviest plugin was the Lexicon 480L taking up 16% on one chip of a quad.
Once I added another unit, that went down to 8%. Added another, that went down to 4% etc. Now I pull it up, and it only takes 1%. Now, with that said, a 1176 in stereo takes up 1% (which in reality is 2 units) same with LA2A. Some plugins especially in "Legacy" which I use mostly cause they sound great and I can get 5 on 1 chip (1176) or 6 on 1 chip with (LA2A).
Now, could I do a full mix with 5 Quads, YES! They just don't have everything I need plugin wise so, that's where Native plugins help big time. Now with the M1 Pro Macbook Pro, I have yet to use more than 60% on the Macbook Pro and 50% on the UAD system. I'm doing a mix right now, using 264 plugins, mostly high-end plugins no legacy on this one and I'm only using 37% on the UAD and 59% on the Macbook Pro M1 Pro. This is a really huge session with a lot of vocals that I didn't mix down and a lot of music.
27 instruments, 24 busses, 20 EFX Busses with (Lexion 480L, 224, Pure Path, AMS RMX, EMT 140 and 250, UAD Capitol, Ocean Way Reverb) and many more, and 62 vocal tracks. Plus more stuff that I'm not mentioning.
I could easily get more than 500 plugins with a breeze if needed which I would never need.

So, this fallacy of UAD2 not being enough or that the cards are old etc is just nonsense to me. I'm not sure how everyone else is mixing but, you guys must be using 700 plugins a mix or something like that.

JusMyOpinion, Marc

Thats a lot of units/cards. Are you still working at 44.1/48k??

To be honest, I don't think its a very practical solution to offset the need for more power. That approach can only take you so far too. Not to mention its a very expensive way to go about it too.

I remember people hanging on to TDM with tooth and nail, long after its demise. Inevitably they all started hitting brickwalls with that platform. Not that UAD has dropped its support for their DSP platform, but it does seem to me that the writing is on the wall. Especially when you factor in that the chips have remained unchanged for 15 years.

The SHARC developers seemed to have made no effort to reduce their size of heat or increase their power. Going into the future these are the changes UAD will need to see to keep their platform alive. Conversely, if UAD came out tomorrow and announced that they are moving over to another architecture, then yeah, I think the platform will still have a future. As it is, they are axing their hardware developers, which suggests to me they have no interest of doing this and that given a few years the UAD DSP will be going the way of TDM... or the dodo, whichever metaphor you'd prefer.
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