Melbourne Beats

Universal audio Plugins such as

Cambridge EQ

Neve 1073 EQ

Neve 1081 EQ

Pultec EQP-1A

Pultec Pro

1176SE

1176LN

Fairchild 670

LA-2A

LA-3A

NEVE 33609

and heaps more

apparently these emulations are amazing, im just about to purchase 1 or possibly 2 dsp cards, anyone got or used them ?

just a general comment, not on these plugs in particualr. I bought a creamware lunaII with lots of plugs some time back - great purchase with excellent DSPs. But with technology changes I ended up with a piece of hardware that was neigher hard nor software compatible with my setup.

Since then i have been hesitant to by an inboard soundcard again, I stick with firewire.

just something to be aware of, in terms of how long the interface will be useful

got a luna II for sale BTW, no good for macs but

Looks awesome!

What's the cost?

We just got Plugiator here at work - pretty sweet. External USB MIDI box with onboard synths.

No question about their quality, I've heard they're absolutely lovely, used by mastering + mixing engineers on very high profile projects worldwide. On the downside, a little pricey, and some mates that have them have said they can be a little fiddly to integrate into your workflow as they introduce quite a bit of latency, so you either have to bounce/freeze tracks as you go, or be a little more sparing with how frequently you use them. Those things may not be a big deal, it all depends on how you like to work.

foundation stepper, the comment is definitely one to take into consideration, ive heard UAD are possibly doing a firewire thing which may be similar to the powercore... although then u can run into firewire buss conflicts and etc. PCI is definitely a more stable connection. i guess it comes down to the quality of the plug ins really, and UAD are definitely the ones.

direktor, it depends which pack/bundle u get anywhere between $500-$2000 really

a1studmuffin wrote:No question about their quality, I've heard they're absolutely lovely, used by mastering + mixing engineers on very high profile projects worldwide. On the downside, a little pricey, and some mates that have them have said they can be a little fiddly to integrate into your workflow as they introduce quite a bit of latency, so you either have to bounce/freeze tracks as you go, or be a little more sparing with how frequently you use them. Those things may not be a big deal, it all depends on how you like to work.

yeah no doubt, it can def be pricey but... when u take into consideration that a fairchild 670 for example which is long out of production can be worth up to $25000, its probly justifiable.

regarding to the integration/freezing & bouncing tracks, thats mainly becos they dont have enough power/cards right ?

They do have the UAD Xpander, an ExpressCard interface (much bigger bandwidth than firewire). But I wouldn't bother with it. I was so tempted to get one to go with my macbook pro - those plugs are SO GOOD. But with the Xpander, you're limited to one card and I just couldn't justify the cost of it, considering you then have to buy all the other plugs. Most UAD users always start with one card and end up with four.

So I guess I just have to wait for the fabled UAD 2 to magically appear after all these years.

Yea I've read up a fair bit about these cards over the last couple of years, and have come close to getting one or more a number of times. The sound is supposed to be excellent, and as someone pointed out earlier many top engineer's/producers use them.
The main issues i've heard about is that the amount of plugs you can actually load into each card is quite limiting depending on how processor hungry the individual plugins are. The other thing is the latency that they introduce to the overall performance of the daw. Because the host comp cpu has to send the data to the card and back again it adds quite a bit of latency (can't remeber the exact amount but it was substantial I think). If your using them for mastering or you run your system at reasonably high buffer rates then this isn't an issue...but if you run say a quadcore at full capacity then it's going to slow down the whole system. I just wish they'd release the plugs as native, because then you could run a shitload of instance with low latency. I reckon UAD are smart though, because they have basically created the perfect anti-piracy solution for hi-end plugz.
At the end of the day those emulations seriously do look awesome and even just for final mixing and mastering where a bit of latency doesn't matter, I reckon they'd be be some of the first i'd reach for.

yeah right, i have been reading a bit about and issues related to them although didnt realize they introduce as much latency as you say... isnt the whole concept of using dsp power to take the stress off your cpu and decrease latency of the overall system?

how this is comparable to say a powercore firewire device then. i know its a different bunch of plugs although regarding the connection is this a common issue or more so the pci connected cards ?

yea I checked out the powercore specs a while back and they introduce latency also though I can't remember the exact calculation.
In terms of UAD i dug up their manual and here's the spec:

'the latency for each instance of UAD Powered Plug-Ins is equal to twice the current buffer size of the host system. This is because audio needs to travel to the UAD card, then back again. For example, with a buffer size of 256 samples, one Powered Plug-In will introduce 512 samples of latency, and two Powered Plug-Ins in succession will introduce 1024 samples of latency.'

With logic your not going to have to worry about manually adjusting your non-uad tracks latency as its got plugin delay comp. So as your working your not going to notice your overall added system latency if you run at a small host buffer setting. It's probably only when your doing live tracking and using uad, or using virtual instruments live into your host that the higher latency will be noticeable.

I guess since I got the quad and i've had the luxury of running pretty heavy native sessions comfortably at 64-128samples, I don't really want to go back to 1024. Native power is moving forward so quickly, dsp cards are starting to actually slow down performance. Once apple and steinberg actually implement proper support for dual quads, it's going to get ridiculous.

However, at the end of the day its all about the sound and uad really do have awesome plugins. I still wanna get em one day...

Thanks Livewire yeah it was the latency I was getting at. They take a load off your CPU, although this isn't as much as you think when you consider that you've still got a limited number of UAD plugs you can run at any one time on one UAD card. (To be honest with a quad core machine and a sequencer that supports multiple cores, CPU usage shouldn't really be an issue these days. You can always bounce/freeze the hungrier tracks - usually soft synths - when you start running out.)

As Livewire says, the main point of the UAD plugins is the superior sound quality (comparable to some of the more expensive outboard gear) with the benefit of total recall within a project.

http://www.uaudio.com/uad-2/

I thought the day might never come...

hell yeah. rumor confirmed.. read about this in Gearslutz.
Looks like theyl be making the empirical labs distressor a plug as well.
lucky i held off on getting the uad1e.

ExpressCard version announced.

http://www.uaudio.com/press/releases/2009/0115_SL.html

I know. I've only been waiting... oh, about THREE YEARS for this.