Comments on: Metablog: Universal Audio UAD-2 Updates Sound Platform; Why People Want It

By: Perry Sterry

Perry Sterry — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 12:41:43 +0000

Pro Tools users, don’t waste your money. Serious integration issues. UAD cards will not run other plugs. If you only have slots for three cards, you’ll have to sacrifice one of your PT cards and intern HD processing power. An expansion chassis will cost you about 2K. All this for what? Take your money and invest in some great plugs already available for TDM and in most cases, better than UAD plugs. Also, if you ever need customer service-You can forget Universal Audio.

By: poopoo

poopoo — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 10:45:59 +0000

Barry Vercoe, the guy who wrote CSound, was a consultant with Analog Devices in the late 90’s. They had a pci dsp card with sharcs that ran “extended csound” on the dsp. I wonder if any of the csound stuff is still used in the UAD?

By: Sean

Sean — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 08:26:41 +0000

Hi Peter, thanks for linking KeyOfGrey, I’m a big fan of this site. I’m certainly not an expert on add-on DSP cards, but I do most of my work on a MacbookPro and would welcome the ability to have processing power on the go. This is not to say that I would rather have this card over a cheaper and faster solution, like a Logic node, when I’m mixing which is normally at home. Nor, would I rather have this card over the emulated analog gear. At 2 grand for the fully optioned UAD-2, it’s encroaching on the territory of a real Neve channel strip. I would gladly live with the “limitations” of only one strip if it meant I had the real thing. Still, the UAD-1 had some nice software plug-ins and there’s certainly value if a person pays that two grand once for the hardware, and then is able to leverage the value of the plug-ins. In my opinion, it is what software developers make of the hardware standard offered by the UAD-2 that is most interesting.

Sean

By: links for 2008-09-03 « Jay’s blog

links for 2008-09-03 « Jay’s blog — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 05:31:07 +0000

[...] Create Digital Music » Metablog: Universal Audio UAD-2 Updates Sound Platform; Why People Want It [...]

By: YJ

YJ — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:41:14 +0000

i had an UAD-1 PCI-e card, but the UAD-2 costs
$2000 per card, which is more than my three audio studio computers..
bhahahaha what a joke.. i guess we have to wait a few years for the prices to come down..

By: Create Digital Motion » CPU vs. GPU Mythbusters Demo Reveals a Lot

Create Digital Motion » CPU vs. GPU Mythbusters Demo Reveals a Lot — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:24:11 +0000

[...] doesn’t work as well for audio tasks. Interestingly, this week as I chatted about a new release of a dedicated DSP-chip platform called the UAD-2 on Create Digital Music, people brought up this question of whether GPU chips [...]

By: Peter Kirn

Peter Kirn — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 02:42:54 +0000

@poopoo: Well, I called it a killer app, just because people liked it. But I don’t think it was “I need that. I’ll buy a UAD-2.” I think it was more, “If I owned this, I could run the Moog filter” (on top of everything else).

But yeah, I think a lot of UI design has moved on from simply copying vintage gear. Fortunately, there are some people doing amazing work in that area in software.

OASYS… interesting. Well, the OASYS as you know runs natively on a CPU (hello, Linux). Which brings us back to the original question here, eh?

By: poopoo

poopoo — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 01:59:03 +0000

It’s such a pity the plugin’s look like tired old emulations of fetished gear. The so called “killer app” is a low pass filter?!?

I’d rather see something like the Korg Oasys PCI only updated for the 21st century.

By: foosnark

foosnark — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 15:03:20 +0000

I’m not sold on GPGPU stuff myself. (And I just came back from NVision08 last week, where there was a lot of CUDA talk and a bit about DX11 “compute shaders.” There was a distinct lack of audio-related discussion.)

I get the sense that it’s kind of a hacky stopgap, like Commodore 64 programs that took over the processor on the floppy drive. I think we’re going to see a bit less of an architectural schism in a few years; maybe the GPU will go the way of the separate FPU, and CPUs will have this massively parallel vector processing monster just built right in, and you can drop a new one in every 6 months for $300 if you want to.

By: Jordan Hochenbaum

Jordan Hochenbaum — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 12:09:53 +0000

Without getting into GPU and other discussions, I’d like to quickly share that I used the UAD-1 plugins and I was seriously impressed.

Alright, it’s 5am, I should go BACK to sleep :)