OK declaration of interest. I’m a UAD user since 2003 and currently run UAD-2 OCTO with 52 plugs accumulated across the years. Firstly myth #1, why is it so expensive? Two-part answer: 1] it isn’t and 2] it has to be. If you’re a deep user, you get continually bombarded with breath-taking offers. Currently I’ve got 80 off the most popular plugs with a personal 40 off teaser, giving me 120 straight off the top of most of the desirable stuff (I got the Manley stuff for 75 a pop). The other side to this coin, is that the reason the plugs are so damn good, and some of them, for example the Manley plugs are totally unique to the platform is that UA know they’re going to get their money back, unlike most soft devs who run a continual cashflow battle against the cracks.

Myth #2: why don’t they get cracked? Well you have a hardware DSP system, the UAD-2 hardware, that is actually a second generation SHARC dedicated DSP system that runs the plugs. The code is un-runnable on any CPU. This hardware contains a unique large encryption key that can’t be read off the board without destroying the board. Each board has a unique key and only UA know from your hardware serial # what your key is, so the authorisation file is absolutely unique to the hardware you own.

Myth #3: they aren’t any good. Are they really so damn good? Yes, they are. I can run most all of the equivalent soft offerings (where they exist, either legit or try before you buy) and the UAD offerings are either identical to or head and shoulders above their soft equivalents. The difference between some offerings (the Neve 1073 springs to mind) is so much better than even Waves offering it’s shocking. Gobsmackingly shocking.

Do you really need this stuff? No, you don’t. The real downsides are: no side chains, not ever, the current plugs don’t support it, and the system is latency slower than native, by a significant degree. Native is faster in PDC terms by up to a factor of around 10. Benefits: it’s like doubling the number of CPU cores, offloading processing onto the SHARCs and you get hardware that costs severely silly semolians all in the price of a premium (and often cut price) plug.

The reason you can’t move for Pultec, 1176 and Fairchild emulations is because UAD introduced them under UAD 1. It’s not a must have, but having it is very, very nice. Look at it this way, you can’t download a Shadow Hills compressor, you have to spend thousands on the real thing. Can you make do with a plug? It the same with UAD. It’s hardware with a soft component, it’s not software.

 

And when you want a new car you wait for a cracked one.... buy your plugin is necessary for me because it's the way you choose your product and not to take app cracked choosen not by you...

 

It's 2019 and people still ask for this????

 

I would rather invest in a more powerful PC , Bigger Screen , Hardware Controller, better speakers, more acoustic treatment before I would get a UAD.

 

how anybody in the right mind would ask something like this? UAD crack? wtf

 

Soothe is not cracked yet, let alone UAD lmao

 

if you mean solution to create own UAD hardware acceleration rig....keep dreaming,
imo UAD is overrated, nobody cares

 

Cracking UAD would be like cracking the new version of Nexus: cool, but useless. There are countless plugins now out there that sound almost like UAD if not better. UAD would be just cool like it would be cool to have all the expansions of the new Nexus, but we all know we can also survive without that.

 

to increase the chaos of the thread, console games were made to run only on special processors developed for the consoles, and there are emulators of almost all of them for PC

 

I wonder, what's your opinion on UAD plugins being increasingly more SHARC-hungry? new plugins eat so much performance from older UAD interfaces it's almost impossible to use older UAD hardware anymore

 

In principal you're quite right - if nobody else in the world (other than UAD) made plugins and the survival of the human race depended on it, it COULD (and would) be hacked and ported - or at least emulated - within a month at most... however, in the real world, it's mostly because the games market is considerably larger and emulators are always slower. Besides, just like AVID/pro-tools, the other main reason you buy into UAD tech is for the dedicated/augmented onboard processing power.

 

Last edited: Mar 19, 2019

Well that's merely indicative of the corporate circle-jerk nature of the 'high-end', 'pro' audio market - which imo is, as often as not, scant more than regurgitated, over-hyped, smoke & mirrors elitist muso huate couture...

 

Last edited: Mar 19, 2019

That's the cynical 'beauty' of the UAD business model - you gotta keep investing in/upgrading your UAD hardware to keep up with your ever-mounting UAD software requirements...

 

Last edited: Mar 19, 2019

Well, what's your opinion of DAWs being ever more resource hungry? Try running software from a decade ago and see how much more efficient it was, but less feature rich. We've been at third generation SHARC for at least three years (and probably much longer).

Stuff changes. It's the way of the world. Whatever happened to half-inch 8 track?

 

In sixteen years of using UAD, I got on the bus at UAD 1, I'm still on at UAD 2, and it was worth it. How many CPU's have you been through in the last 16 years? I went through four. That's the cynical 'beauty' of the Wintel business model - you gotta keep investing in/upgrading your DAW hardware to keep up with your ever-mounting DAW software requirements.

Or ar you still running on Win XP?

 

ah perhaps I didn't write my question well,
I meant, if you particularly like something about newer UAD plugin releases compared to older ones, to be justified by higher resource usage,

my stance to increasing software resource usage results in continuous hunt for smarter solutions, I left Sonar for Reaper, Adobe for Affinity, Windows for MacOS etc..

I was even checking some documentation for SHARC solutions, various DSPs, plugin APIs etc... overall I can't tell the dependency on specialized hardware is effective in the long run

 

I dont know what means "lot twist alert" ...

 

Yeah, it's a fair point. Probably best not to think how much i've spent (in time as well as cash) upgrading over the years...

If UAD had designed their kit with an open API approach that could have been utilised by all VST developers I certainly would have bought-in, 'cos for a long time DAW use really was quite (resource) stressful. Regrettably, they didn't - and in 2019 there are definitely more cost-effective, flexible option out there.

For DAW performance XP was mostly excellent and had it supported 64 bit architecture (and maybe a couple of daw-friendly enhancements) i bet it'd still be the OS of choice for DAW work even today, 'cos as i see it nearly all MS development from 8.0 onwards has gone into supplying tablet eye candy, microsoft store tie-ins and spook-friendly 'security' enhancements. So, yeah, i'm on win7 64 - and as happy with it as any MS customer can be - which i guess translates as hmm, er...

Anyways, so long as you're getting value from your investment, it's all good!

 

Last edited: Mar 19, 2019

Well I suppose it depends upon your workflow. It's horses for courses in my experience. The only people I know of with eight Neve 1073s are seriously well remunerated Pro's like Schepps. You can run 8 UAD Neve 1073 on an OCTO which is around six more than I ever really need in my work sessions. It's the same with Manley VOXBOXes and Massive Passives. The sheer density of the application mitigates against you ever needing that many of them. They're not console tools after all. The only large UAD I ever get snitty about having a limitation on is the Never 88RS console strip. But again, it's a limitation that the real world would barf on you over. There's maybe a half a dozen operating real 88RSs left and getting time on one would cost an awful lot more than UAD plug.

The tools you really use in multiple depths, such as the Massenburg EQ and the ELysia Compressors, I've never hit the cieling with those.