KVR Audio

soulata · Post by **soulata** » Mon Sep 19, 2005 9:20 am

I'm on a verge of buying an UltraPak. Here are my thoughts:

pros (soundwise/pricewise)

3 great compressors (LA2A, 1176, fairchild)
3 great EQs (Pultecs + Cambridge)
1 great reverb (plate140)
almost no CPU load

cons

could be outdated somewhere in the future (but what won't be)
has some problems in certain configs

---

I can get the UltraPak for roughly 1200$ here, if I was to buy native plugins, I guess it'd cost me roughly the same (depends really).

Voxengo & Kjaerhus would cost me a bit less, Sonalksis and Elemental Audio would be even more expensive.

What do you think?

edit: that's 3 great compressors, forgot Fairchild

daverich · Post by **daverich** » Mon Sep 19, 2005 9:26 am

personally i think the one to go for is the studio pak and then buy the plate as an extra.

You're getting the cream of the crop then - you could probably find another project pak to double your plug-in count as well for less than the ultra pak.

Personally I think the uad is still essential still for getting the best sound possible in the VST format.

You will want 2 cards though if you're doing any kind of large mixing.

Kind regards

Dave Rich

Sascha Franck · Post by **Sascha Franck** » Mon Sep 19, 2005 9:33 am

I'm sure that my next audio machine (which most likely will be a Mac) will feature a UAD card. The compressors and EQs are the very reason for this, especially since the real great sounding native solutions are still clogging up your CPU quite noticeably.
IMO DSP cards are a great solution if you need EQs and compressors. Unlike other plugins you won't necessarily need them for realtime playing (I mean, anything running through a DSP card will double your latency) and having these bread n butter things running without any noticeable CPU hit is just great.
Recently I configured a friends new audio machine, he's using 2 UADs, so it's been the first time I had some hands on experience with their plugins - absolutely great stuff!

Sascha Franck · Post by **Sascha Franck** » Mon Sep 19, 2005 9:37 am

Oh yes, I kinda agree with Dave - the reverb isn't exactly essential IMO. Meanwhile there's great native solutions around (I just love my Arts Acoustic Reverb) which won't cause all that much of a CPU hit either.

soulata · Post by **soulata** » Mon Sep 19, 2005 9:41 am

daverich wrote:personally i think the one to go for is the studio pak and then buy the plate as an extra.

not worth it here. StudioPak is 1000$ and UltraPak is 1250$. ProjectPak is around 500$ (a price of being in EU).

daverich wrote: You will want 2 cards though if you're doing any kind of large mixing.

I know

If it's worth it I'll be getting another card soon after 1.1. December gig galore

soulata · Post by **soulata** » Mon Sep 19, 2005 9:58 am

@Dave:

yup, studio pak might do the trick. I don't care much for Limiter, Precision Eq and Pultec Pro...they're expensive if bought separately.

I'm sure I'll need Plate140 sometime soon though.

JeffSanders · Post by **JeffSanders** » Mon Sep 19, 2005 10:15 am

I agree with Dave. Go for the Studio Pack. Then buy a Project Pack down the road for more power. All of your plugs will register for both cards (you won't need to buy the plugs twice).

pitchdrifter · Post by **pitchdrifter** » Mon Sep 19, 2005 10:26 am

Buy them 2nd hand then. You get the really nice plugins that way for a good bit less money.
What I can highly recommend are the prcision limiter, the pultec pro (you can pull up 16-20k in that one to give some 'air' to a mix, and it sounds natural, doing that a lot here), the plate140 (if you are after a plate reverb, that is.. obviously, it's no allround reverb and certainly does not replace room reverb units you might need.

The fairchild is absolutely top for 'don't smash it!' compression, you retain the character of the original sound if you want it to, and you can compress quite brutally, without having it sound smashed flat.

If you want allround reverbs of top quality then either native or powercore (dvr2, vss3 plugins which are algos plugged from the TC System 6000) is recommendable. R66 is a native verb that doesn't have a dsp based alternative yet, and I keep hearing the artsacoustic reverb plugins is great, too (not tried that one myself since I haven't had a need to yet).

There's no need to worry about 'out of date dsp cards' - you will always be able to do with these dsp cards what you can do now, as long as you keep a DAW around that can carry the cards with an OS for which there are drivers available from the card manufacturers. Even the latest pc setups let you use ordinary PCI cards, and you'll always be able to use pci expansion chassis of some sort.
Really no need to be concerned about 'the future'. Besides you want to do work now, not wait until you think you found that something that is ultimately future proof (and you'll find there is no such thing anyway).

What should be said about the UAD is that the UAD will cause dropouts when used in pci slots on motherboards with the AMD 8131. That chipset is often used on dual opteron boards and can be found on some dual g5 boards as well.
It appears that moving the uads into a pci expansion chassis fixes this problem, I can't personally confirm that one yet since i'm still waiting to get hands on that chassis (these you need anyway when you want more than 2 dsp/other cards in dual opteron/g5 systems, as the amount of pci slots on the motherboards is growing thin).

So if you donn't intend on getting one of these magma chassis, I recommend you check your motherboard manual to see if there is a AMD 8131 chip anywhere, if not it'll be safe to use the UAD card without problems (note that if the board has bandwidth bottlenecks which cause you problems now, the UAD won't be able to fix that either. But if your motherboard has no such issues, the UAD won't be causing any, either).

hth

Markus

Ronny Pries · Post by **Ronny Pries** » Mon Sep 19, 2005 11:10 am

i love the effects, they're indeed great value. but it's also quite buggy... too bad universal audio doesn't bother caring about the denormals

soulata wrote: almost no CPU load

stefancrs · Post by **stefancrs** » Mon Sep 19, 2005 11:24 am

The downside with having DSP cards and the alike is that your projects gets a dependency against a certain hardware. The upsides are plenty, but the downside is big enough for me to not even consider getting any kind of specific DSP card. If there was a general API which the card manufacturers would support, kindof like HLSL on GPU's, we'd have a totally different situation.
OTOH, if someone would put some efforts into it, one could use HLSL for general DSP.

billybk1 · Post by **billybk1** » Mon Sep 19, 2005 1:31 pm

Ronny Pries wrote:i love the effects, they're indeed great value. but it's also quite buggy... too bad universal audio doesn't bother caring about the denormals

soulata wrote: almost no CPU load

Hey Ronny, I have always found UA support to be top notch and very responsive to inquiries. Have you talked to UA about your denormal problems?
From the face of it, it appears you may have a configuration or system hardware related issue. I have two cards myself and the few isolated problems I have (like native CPU munching in Vegas 5) or (project looping/PDC in SONAR 4.02), are specific host issues. I can run 16-24, of the premium UAD-1 plugs (2 cards worth), in a SONAR project and the puny PIII 1Ghz CPU, in my DAW, only shows an average, of 5%-9% total added native CPU usage. Not bad for 16-24 added UAD-1 plugins, in a project. If it was a true universal denormal problem, every single UAD-1 user would be seeing it.

billybk1 · Post by **billybk1** » Mon Sep 19, 2005 1:47 pm

soulata wrote: cons

could be outdated somewhere in the future (but what won't be)

I recently sent an email to UA product support, and made an inquiry into whether UA was going to provide the necessary UAD-1 drivers for WinXP 64. This is important to me, as I just put my upgrade order in, for SONAR 5 Producer, which will include both native 32bit and 64bit versions and I intend to eventually move my DAW to x64, in the future.
I got a prompt reply back a few hours later, indicating that they were intending to provide x64 driver support, for the UAD-1. They could not give any definitive dates, of course, but did say driver support was, in the works. I don't see the UAD-1 getting outdated, any time soon.

soulata · Post by **soulata** » Mon Sep 19, 2005 2:17 pm

thanks everybody.

I still haven't decided between Ultra and Studio, but I'll definetly buy me one.

(plus some acoustic panels mics, that'll do for this year)

k

scuzzphut · Post by **scuzzphut** » Mon Sep 19, 2005 2:20 pm

Project Pak - £349

So - what are the limitations on the number of plugins the hardware will run simultaneously ?

Stupid American Pig · Post by **Stupid American Pig** » Mon Sep 19, 2005 2:25 pm

Im with ya, I am thinking of getting the studio pack mesself using the Sam Ash 15 month plan, I just want to sell my Stratocaster first...

Uad-1 - Good value