Perhaps you should do more research how UAD platform(s) work before you bought the unit? Everything's there on UA website, including how many instances you can run on one SHARC, using plugins in your DAW etc...

For me it's okay. I have 12 SHARCS and 80-ish UAD plugins + more than powerful processor for native versions. But the biggest advantage for me is UNISON technology paired with my Townsend Labs L22 mic.

My dissapointment is that UA puts Windows users last and don't care much about them. Now that's shitty

 

eeeek

eeeek

eeeek

Only the "you need to be online" is missing to win the next big bullshit price

Have you read the comments on the video


___

 

Last edited: Mar 31, 2022

Fair Deal ? 17 Plugins(atm) for $20 a month? Thats 240/ Year. I rather pay one time $240 to be able to use it multiple years as other vendors offer.

 

They're not ignoring Windows it just is not released until Fall.

 

If that is the case, than you can conclude the DSP technology they offer is going to be EOL. Nobody knows what the CPU hit is, but if this is significant, an extra UAD DSP card could still be beneficial. Not sure if I am all that excited about this new trend, as a current owner hahaha

 

I'm sure they will lose some of their interface market obviously, but there are many who like them in a tracking situation with the dsp with near zero latency, which is understandable, and nice having that built into the interface.

That said, in a mixing situation, their interfaces won't be needed in that regard, and while their interfaces are just fine, albeit a little pricey, ... I just don't think according to reports read that with modern cpu's that their cpu hit will be that heavy (depending on the individual plugins of course).

 

Actually, you might be wrong about that. I belong to a users group on Facebook for Townsend Labs, which was bought out by UAD recently. Because of that, there's several UAD staff that post in that group. On a few occasions I brought up my dissatisfaction with UAD only releasing additional mic emulations for the Townsend L22 for people with UAD hardware, and how I was hoping for a native version of those emulations. The reason given by every one of these UAD people for not doing it was that a native Windows version would get 'cracked' and UAD would lose on the deal. They didn't specifically mention R2R, but if the reason they don't want to do it is it would get cracked there are only a handful of groups you'd expect to see it from.

P.S. I really hate UAD.

 

I could see that. I literally have sat in with meetings with larger companies as a consultant and they are absolutely aware of R2R and the fact that more windows releases (these days especially) are in the wild... It is a thing for them. And why they like their dongles.

But with iLok compromised for all intents and purposes on Windows, not on MacOS, I can see them first dipping their toe in that water (not to say UAD haven't been behind on Windows releases but....) and see what the market bears.

Let's be honest, outside of what I mentioned earlier in terms of tracking mode latency etc, UAD and their 'special sauce' Sharc chips (and I know they are scaleable) and their breathless advertisements about the "power" of them and whatever and whatnot are sheer nonsense.

I'm sure the lowest model MacBook with an m1 chip can crush instances of their plugins natively by a large factor vs their hardware. And they know that as well, and know that the tide is changing.

They should have done this awhile ago, but I think they were hoping to shore up CP in the Windows realm, as why would they ignore the biggest user base on this "great natively run subscription service" unless they were worried about that tbh... ?

 

Some people will still want it for the unison and zero latency tracking. And it all depends on how fast or slow they decide to move all the UAD2 plugins to native, personally I think they're going to take there time and drip feed them to people.

But yeah if I was someone who'd invested heavily into the satellites and pcie cards I'd be quite pissed at this point.

 

Yeah, and I get that is a draw for some people, and I have enjoyed it myself in that regards, as who the hell enjoys latency when recording vocals or guitar or whatnot? So there will still be a market for that... and honestly they are better at that then most others who slap on a compressor/reverb etc ability on the front end for that, but it isn't the same, and as a performer, you do not perform to that the same....

and yup, this is where it is ultimately going to cost them, but they have been riding that gravy train for a long time. As I have said before, their interfaces aren't bad.... at all.. but just considering their A/D etc, its not like they are better then a Roland Octocapture for the most part or years old Focusrites and whatnot. People pay a pretty penny for the hype marketing and their "partnerships" with esteemed companies for their exclusive onboard plugins and dsp.

Outside of the tracking/inbetween source and daw latency etc, there is nothing they bring to the table that another competent interface does.

But time has caught up to them I imagine, as people know that, and they had a good thing going for awhile... and will probably milk it for even longer yet... but it's not a good long term plan for them AT ALL.

Best to figure out a way to capitalize on their "plug ins" and licensing with different companies now (and why they are avoiding the far more easily cracked Windows platform at first wishing on a prayer...)... then be left in the dust.

 

"what will be the fate for for users owning UAD2 PCIe cards?"

Nothing.....that didn't already ready happen to users owning TC Electronics Power Core PCI
cards......years ago. I still use mine.....

 

Couldn't agree more! At this point I've owned at least a half dozen different audio interfaces suitable for home use, through a number of years, and I always reach the conclusion that UAD is overpriced nonsense. It's not that I think their hardware is bad, it's just not all that special either. And I hate that at every turn they attempt to elbow you into buying their hardware when its really something else that you want, like some plugin, or in my case these L22 mic emulations. I'll be damned if I'll buy their overpriced hardware just to get a hold of that software. However, day in and day out I see their staff on Facebook trying to hustle you in that direction.

Personally, I use RME hardware and nothing UAD does will ever get me to give up on RME's reliability, stable drivers, and sound quality at significantly lower prices than much of the UAD stuff. Nothing. Yet somehow they think they're going to turn people like me around to get a hold of some software. Never gonna happen.

The funny part about this is I'd bet if they wanted to attack it, a group like R2R could probably modify UAD's software so that it would work without the UAD hardware anyway. More or less the R2R native version. They're skilled enough to do it if they wanted to put the time into it. That would be some laugh if they did that, I'd love to see the faces on UAD staff if that ever happened.

 

Yeah, christ, I've been using A/D's or D/A's since Digidesign had their Dat i/o unit and whatnot (circa 1991 ffs)... and I've have had dozens of different interfaces. And I'm glad that the playing field has leveled insomuch as there isn't THAT much difference between most middle of the road (aka UAD/Focusrite/Motu/etc) interfaces, and their are some higher end ones that if those want to spend money on, and have the reason, God bless.

No one is being stopped from recording a damn song right now as the technology to do it at least "competently" is out of reach financially.

As we have both said, UAD isn't "bad", but their marketing scheme and relentless advertising attached to licensing "names" that people hold sacred is basically a damn tupperware party.

I haven't used the L22, but I will look into it as to be able to respond intelligently about it, as I'm not sure if they could do ~zero latency without the UAD hardware now, but i totally get your point.

and I'm tired of their hustle as well. Again, I get why some people like certain things about them, but there is a lot of snake oil involved in certain aspects (especially the post tracking plug in shit needing their chips or their brilliant coding ((some of which is good/great but...)... for example, their famous pantsing of their VOG fucking plugin by Boz Digital Labs...

reference:

https://gearspace.com/board/product...s/854532-bark-dog-kind-funny-version-vog.html

RME is great. I don't know how they do it, but their latency and drivers are amongst the best in the business, and conversion is great, their price point.... all of it... 100% agreed. And they seem to support their devices for more then a decade ffs ... They are value. RME easily >>>>>>>>>>>> UAD no question.

 

What about us guys with our nubus cards?

x3

 

Wrong! UAD plugins are coded natively and ported over to use sharc chips (and TDM back in the day) as dsp!

There has NEVER been a technical reason UAD plugins could not have been released as native at any point in the past. And while the initial use of dsp chips was truly state of the art 25 years ago, due to Moore's law (more powerful cpus), and UAD's choice to continue to milk and sell underpowered devices, devolved UAD devices to essentially overpriced dongles.

As others have stated, the primary reason UAD has kept their platform linked to DSP is because it served secondarily as a physical anti-piracy protection device. Yes, dsp systems were useful in the past, and can still be useful (unison/zero latency), but the world 'by and large' has long since moved on from overpriced 'dsp only' systems in favor of Native processing. Also factoring in that less interfaces are being manufactured/purchased due to covid, (and increasing inflation of the dollar) I'm pretty sure UAD has finally caved in to the pressure to open up the ecosystem in hopes of a profitable business model that is not dependent/linked to hardware sales.

OR, as I speculated last year here: https://audiosex.pro/threads/r2r-10k.60425/page-12#post-579125 that someone already had, or would successfully emulate the sharc chip (possibly done by a cracking team), and was either sold to UAD, or UAD bought them out before it was made public. So UAD knew it was only a matter of time either way, and a back door deal was made.

Either way, the idea that porting their plugins to native was ever some sort of hurdle, or would cost UAD anything significant is just BS.

 

Last edited: Mar 31, 2022

What you said here have always wondered me, "DSP chips sounds different than, let's say, x86 CPUs", "they have their own sound"

When we're talking about sound, and integrated circuits, it quite ubiquitously puts on my mind the idea of a virtualized representation of a signal, and basic computer architecture. With my very restrained knowledge on the domain, mind you put the lights on some points with your competent point of view ? I can't get that an DSP chip would handle with a different "quality" digital signal processing, since, the same rules apply I guess, sampling, bit depth, ect. I read this today on Model 7 fans telling no plug-in nor native solution could reach the sonics of a M7 (I don't know on what the beast is on actually, but I would bet good money on a Analog Devices chip).

Very interesting what you said here and I'm quite following your point of view in the rest of your post.

But, without entering in unnecessary speculative debate, as spark seem to be a "wrapper" for UAD-2 powered plugins (so running with SHARC instructions), why would they write a subsidiary burdensome layer to their products if native versions should already exist ? That's kind of wicked for the consumer if it's the case.

 

Funny that you mentioned this, when I saw that they've emulated the Sharc I wondered if its a lot easier to crack now.

 

I think Spark is UAD's final attempt to stay relevent and exclusive.

But let's take a step back: the UAD ecosystem – proprietary, hardware-driven DSP – is a relict of times, when PCs didn't have enough processing power (cores and threads) to run demanding plugins. The UAD 1 expansion cards to offload the processing came to exitence in 2004 when CPUs still were running on Pentiums…

Nowadays, with these super powerful and cheap CPUs, these cards are totally irrrelevant, so now UAD is looking for a niche to still be relevant. But they want to keep selling their overpriced audio interfaces, too. But who would still buy these interfaces if you could just use any inteface and just run UAD plugins on any pc without additional hardware… get it?

So offering the plugins as a subscriptoin only service is their final attempt, to remain somewhat exclusive. In other words, if you want the plugins but don't want the subscription service, just boycott them completeley: no trial, no monthly pays, nothing. And then the only thing they can do is offering the plugins for sale.

I think I am going to sell my UAD2 Solo card now, whil it's still worth a penny or two. Never liked the shit anyway. Doesn't really work well with NI Maschine.

 

I have mixed feelings about this.

I sold my Satellite Quad core a year or so ago and picked up an Apollo Twin (which I totally love). The onboard processing for guitars/bass/mics is nothing short of game-changing (for me). However, I tend to use it less for DSP when mixing as it has its limitations. Now that Spark has been released I can definitely see myself turning back to UA for its Preamps and Reverbs.

 

Whats coming next, High End Converters including Audacity?

Lmfao I am imagining the faces of UAD board directors when they've seen the graphs "Uhh-ohhh shieettt"

God beware people who have ~10ms roundtrip, how would anyone without their overpriced interfaces be able to make le epic muzak now???
But honestly, the only situation where that would come in handy is when you... want to use your backup laptop as guitar pedal? lul