Thinking of selling my UAD and my Powercore PCI, am i crazy?

[Amberience]

Its not the upgrade thing that makes me think you're living in the past. Its the fact you want emulations or models of old gear. Get over it. You don't need something pretending to be a NEVE whateverythingymajig to make music.

Considering that almost every single plugin is an emulation of something in hardware(some more than others) I think this statement is a bit silly myself. "Need" is a strong word. "Desire" I can understand.

Devon

Need is a strong word which is why its dumb when people use it in reference to gear - that was my point. Nobody NEEDS any of this stuff to record music. Some of the most endearing tracks I've ever heard were recorded with a simple tape machine and a microphone.

You totally misunderstood me.

[aMUSEd]

Its not the upgrade thing that makes me think you're living in the past. Its the fact you want emulations or models of old gear. Get over it. You don't need something pretending to be a NEVE whateverythingymajig to make music.

But what has that got to do with this thread? DSP based solutions do offer some emulations of old gear but they also offer new stuff not available as hardware - e.g Zarg Solaris 4 or Powercore's new Fabrik. In other words - same as non DSP solutions.

[DevonB]

Its not the upgrade thing that makes me think you're living in the past. Its the fact you want emulations or models of old gear. Get over it. You don't need something pretending to be a NEVE whateverythingymajig to make music.

But what has that got to do with this thread? DSP based solutions do offer some emulations of old gear but they also offer new stuff not available as hardware - e.g Zarg Solaris 4 or Powercore's new Fabrik. In other words - same as non DSP solutions.

I'd also have a hard time considering Virus or the V Station to be emulations of 'old' or 'vintage' gear too. "Oh, that's sooooo 2003!" DSP cards are just another method of delivering audio, nothing more, nothing less.

Devon

[munchkin]

"Never mind the quality, feel the width." That's what we used to say in the rag trade and the same applies to DSP.

If you want a broad sound then go with DSP. If you're into saving money then go native.

DSP cards tap into zero point energy. That's their appeal. I straddle both worlds and let the music speak for itself.

Rock on!

[Amberience]

Its not the upgrade thing that makes me think you're living in the past. Its the fact you want emulations or models of old gear. Get over it. You don't need something pretending to be a NEVE whateverythingymajig to make music.

But what has that got to do with this thread?

Jack shit.

[mike goodwin]

I sold my uad a while back.

I don't miss it, and actually everything works alot better now than it used to.

More hardware = more things to go wrong = BAD THING.

Kind regards

Dave Rich

I am feeling this more and more as I check out other software. I have been checking out VB audio, PSP, Kjaerhus, Voxengo, Ohm Force. To my ears OHM Force filters are nicer than the UAD filters, the Mobileohm chourus sounds better than other I have ever heard. The Kjaehrus compressors have there own sound, it is very different from UAD but is very high quality to my ears, again the PSP mix pack sounds a little more like the UAD LA2A to my ears but not the same at all. Again as it has been said so many times, it is all a matter of taste. It is also a matter of picking the right tool for the job. I would like to try out the waves but I dont want to deal with there protection, same goes with URS. Some people here are talking about this as going native is cheaper. I am not looking for a cheaper option. I am looking for an option that is low latency and upgrades with my computer with ease. At least when I go out and spend $1000 bucks on native plugins the chance of me being able to keep them on my future systems. I am getting sick and tired of having to chage the way that I work because I have run out of power on my UAD card or when I want to upgrade my motherboard and CPU. The main reason I am thinking of keeping my uad is so that I use there mastering plugs on a seperate computer.

[DevonB]

Want something that'll easily upgrade with your computer every time you upgrade? Get external hardware units. My Eventide has gone through every PC upgrade since my 486, and still works like a champ.

I still go through the same concerns as other have expressed. What happens if my Pulsar II card dies? Then I've lost plug-ins I've paid for, and would have to buy a new card, then pay for the stinkin' transfer fee. Either way, I look at the low cost of DSP cards, how many instances I can run on a single computer, and just accept the fact there will be some issues in the future. It's certainly MUCH more economical and flexible than dealing with pieces of hardware that I will never have to upgrade. I honestly don't feel that I will be using the plugins I'm using today 20 years from now. There is a balance here. If you find native plug-in's that you prefer better, then hey, go for it. I still prefer the UAD-1 one's personally. It's only plugins, not a religion.

Devon

[kritikon]

You don't need something pretending to be a NEVE whateverythingymajig to make music.

Totally irrelevant and totally silly. You can make music with anything you want, of course. The whole point is that some people want to make music with a certain sound character and with certain tools that they feel comfortable with and like using. I could equally say that you don't NEED native s/w to make music with, because you can equally do it as easily with a complete h/w setup. And that would be equally irrelevant and silly. The man was asking for either solutions to using a UAD, or equivalent native options. He wasn't asking about your jealousy of people who can afford better quality toys than those you personally use. Because that's all you come across with. Of course nobody needs a UAD, nobody needs a Pultec Eq, nobody also needs Synth1 or Toxic or SIR. Some, however choose particular tools and just get on with it instead of maoning about the tools others choose to use.

Want something that'll easily upgrade with your computer every time you upgrade? Get external hardware units.

Devon actually makes a very sensible point. Native is getting better, and so is the power of PCs year by year. However...h/w will always work with it. COnsider that although the power of PCs goes up every year, so too does the power needed by some s/w tools. When Z3ta first came out, the PC I used just couldn't cope with it to use comfortably. Many PCs still can't comfortably cope with a full mix and use convolution at the same time - not if you want 2 reverbs, which is not unusual. Also the OS changes regularly - it maybe takes between 5 and 10 years for it to go out of date, but it does. I eventually upgraded from Win98 to XP simply because I had to if I ever wanted to buy anything new again. More and more VST plugins simply didn't work on Win98SE...PSP were one of the companies that spring to mind. Their Easyverb, their Eq, both crashed my 98 setup. Look at things like firewalls ant antivirus s/w - some of those have now stopped supporting Win98 (can't remember which one it is...either AVG or ZoneAlarm - no new updates for 98). Win XP will go the exact same way some year soon.

But if you have analogue jacks on h/w - until that h/w simply rusts or burns out etc, it will always be workable with any (literally ANY) audio setup. The sound has to come out somewhere after all. When you count the cost of upgrading PCs, hosts, OS etc etc, then h/w is not always so expensive.

Another point is the latency and PC power. For sure native s/w is going to get better to use with more and more powerful PCs (although refer above to increasing power needed to drive new s/w) therefore latency will become (hopefully) less and less of an issue. But with h/w and more powerful PCs, latency also becomes less of an issue. If a PC is powerful enough to run all of the brand new uber-plugins that each need a minimum of at least 1GHz processors...then you can also run that same PC at ridiculously low buffers of single samples and thusly have almost no latency at the input stage...i.e. h/w becomes more and more viable too.

I've had some of my h/w for 15 years and most of it is still going strong. Some admittedly have died on the way too. I haven't got a single PC, host or plugin that is 15 years old. I haven't got a single PC, host or plugin from 15 yrs ago that would even work with my latest PC setup. Because 15 yrs ago I used an Atari, VST didn't exist and my host that is now on a completely different platform and 8 full version different from v1.0. Look ahead to 15 years. Do you seriously think any of your current s/w will work on whatever setup you have then? I doubt very much any of it will. But my VCA comps, my gates, my h/w synths (hopefully if still going), my patchbays, my reverbs and multiFXs will all still work with whatever passes for a PC in 15 years. UAD probably won't and neither will a native plugin diesigned for use with WinXP (unless you specifically keep your creaky old 2006 PC that long - which nobody will).


It's merely another choice. Don't dismiss h/w - something like a Lexi 480L - how old are those - ancient. But they still sound good today. And you'd think reverb algos would have moved on hugely since then. Any decent VCA, optical or tube compressor will still do its very good job in 15 years (although you might admittedly need to buy the odd replacement tube...) because compression will still be compression.

There are choices, is all.


Anyone who makes those choices on dogma such as "I must buy something native and s/w because it's sooooooo yesterday to have anything remotely old..." is ultimately going to regret those silly choices. Unless you've made the choices for specific user reasons, not pathetic dogmatic ones.


Anyway...yeah, h/w is still a serious option to replace the UAD. You can buy complete channels strips from companies such as Focusrite etc that are still seriously good. And they'll work in 15 years. You can buy tube amps/comp/limiters, optical comps, VCA comps, analogue Eqs, and even digital units (although I fail often to see the point of those...I'd personally use native over digital h/w on most, but not all situations) and not always at horrible prices. You can also pick up 2nd hand h/w reasonably often. And the reason I dismiss most digital h/w is because it's only s/w in a box, and will eventually be superceded...there's only a few companies who make digital algos so good that they stand up for 15 years - but of course they do exist.


It's another thought.

[mike goodwin]

There are so many options it is true. I am not intrested in having several computers around anymore. I already have a studio computer a computer for live use, my old studio computer, and a family computer :/ enough is enough. From here on in it is going to be native or hardware. So yep I guess I have decided, the uad is on it's way out. And I think I will end up selling the powercore and replacing it with a hardware unit with some form of digital in and out that will get permanently attached to a RME. This has been an interesting thread for me to watch and read through. If anyone wants to buy my UAD project pack with a LA2A for $400CAN let me know. Another thing I found wile looking arond at all this software is that PSP is having a group buy that is almost up to %50 off! And Kjearhus is having a huge summer sale as well.

[Tony Ostinato]

First of all its not correct that mpact2 was designed as a graphics card, it in fact was designed for video AND audio, and the "and audio" is critical as bionicFX discovered. Mpact2 has lots of audio only features that even todays cpus have to work hard to match.

but to mention video cards brings up the parallell that is native is so powerful how come there are NO native video games? maybe its cause most peoples eyes are far more trained than their ears.

heres UA's official take:

Ask the Doctors
by Joe Bryan

This month we discuss PCI Express with UA's VP of Technology, Joe Bryan.

Why did you develop the UAD-1e as a PCIe card instead of an externally connected Firewire box?
We asked several power users what they wanted from us, and they all said, "Firewire, USB, Ethernet!" We then asked them why, and they said, "Because it's external!" So we asked, "Why does it have to be Firewire, USB or Ethernet?" and they all said, "Aren't those the only choices?"

What most people don't realize is that every Mac and Windows computer on the market uses PCI protocols to connect all of its peripheral devices to the CPU. That's what the acronym PCI stands for: Peripheral Component Interconnect. Every Firewire, USB and Ethernet controller is connected to the computer via PCI, just like the hard drive, CD/DVD drive, soundcard, and so on. Even the graphics adapter is connected using PCI as far as the system is concerned. You can confirm this using the Device Manager control panel on Windows (see Figure 1) or using specialized developer tools on Mac OS X (see Figure 2).
"Technology is rarely the limiting factor in any practical product design"


Figure 1: The Windows XP PCI-bus device hierarchy



Figure 2: The Mac OS X PCI-bus device hierarchy (showing a Firewire controller)


Firewire, USB and Ethernet devices essentially connect PCI to a cable using specialized hardware and software. So why deal with all the reliability, complexity, software overhead, and interoperability issues of these devices when you can simply connect the PCI bus directly to your DSP and IO? PCI Express (PCIe) does this directly without any additional controller devices!

What about external DSP that uses Firewire? Can you do that with PCIe?
Not only does PCIe operate both inside your computer and over a cable, but there's no software overhead, there are no interoperability issues, and the bandwidth is much higher than any of the other protocols!

A Firewire S400 connector pokes along at 400 MHz. A single PCIe x1 slot runs at 2.5 GHz and provides more than six times the bandwidth of Firewire S400 and USB 2. Even Firewire 1394b will not deliver anything close to this performance for several years, if ever. (The equivalent port speed for PCIe x1 would be an S3200 port, but the next planned speed step for Firewire is only S1600). Ethernet runs at either 100 MHz or 1 GHz, and USB 2.0 only runs at 420 MHz. The future is already here, and it's PCIe.

The fastest Firewire audio devices provide 32 channels of I/O (64 out, 32 in). That's it. The UAD-1 and UAD-1e can process up to 254 channels of I/O (254 out and 254 in), and you can have up to four cards in a system. That's a lot of data. Even if each card is only processing 64 channels (64 mono plugs or 32 stereo plugs), that would require eight times the bandwidth that can be provided by the current Firewire hardware for the current generation of the UAD-1! Put simply, Firewire just isn't fast enough and isn't reliable enough. PCIe does all this while lowering system loading and latency, and improving reliability and signal integrity (fewer glitches).

So PCIe isn't such a bad idea after all. If it's so great, why didn't you use a x16 slot? Isn't there a law somewhere that says bigger numbers are always better?
Bigger numbers aren't always better. PCIe x1 is much faster than any other existing interconnect, and every PCIe x1 card will work in any PCIe slot. Since we have plenty of bandwidth, we decided to make our card compatible with every PCIe slot. Anything bigger would be like using an 18-wheeler as a golf cart.

Okay, we get the picture. All right, so why didn't you add more DSPs to the UAD-1?
Patience, Grasshopper. Technology is rarely the limiting factor in any practical product design. We sent men to the moon almost 40 years ago, and yet there's still no Disney Moon theme park where you can take mum and the kiddies on holiday.

Adding DSP chips to make a multi-card UAD-1 card might be an option if that were all we had planned for the future of the product line, but we're not stopping quite yet. We're actively developing new products based on new technology, but, sorry, no specific announcements just yet. We can assure you that your current investment in our platform will continue to provide value. We designed the UAD-1 quite a while ago, and although it has been on the market for many years, it continues to sell well and provide value to customers. The real value in our system, however, is the quality of our software-the way our plug-ins make your music sound better-and this will continue to be the case as bigger, faster and louder hardware DSP systems are developed and released.

As for new technology, somebody can always Google a website for some obscure chip with insane performance figures that can never be used in a viable product! There is always some new chip that's right around the corner which the manufacturer claims will completely smoke the current generation of desktop PCs and DSPs, but no one uses them because they are (pick one or more of the following): horribly expensive ($10K for a single chip); not well suited for audio processing; extremely difficult to program; incompatible with everything; destined for speedy obsolescence as the companies come and go. While the UAD-1 may not be the new kid on the block any more, happens to be extremely good at audio processing (unlike graphics GPUs) and continues to have an extremely good performance-per-dollar ratio. In fact, its performance per dollar continues to exceed that of native PCs and all other DSP chips for the quality of processing we provide.

There are many inexpensive DSPs available today, like the BlackFin DSP used in several of our competitors' DSP products. However, these are 16-bit fixed-point DSPs intended for low-cost consumer-grade processors like MP3 players! They are certainly capable of running one or two high-quality plug-ins (using extended precision coding techniques), but not 32 channels of high-quality EQ and compression modeling.

[ObsoleteAcc99]

[DELETED]

[Amberience]

You don't need something pretending to be a NEVE whateverythingymajig to make music.

Totally irrelevant and totally silly. You can make music with anything you want, of course. The whole point is that some people want to make music with a certain sound character and with certain tools that they feel comfortable with and like using. I could equally say that you don't NEED native s/w to make music with, because you can equally do it as easily with a complete h/w setup. And that would be equally irrelevant and silly. The man was asking for either solutions to using a UAD, or equivalent native options. He wasn't asking about your jealousy of people who can afford better quality toys than those you personally use. Because that's all you come across with. Of course nobody needs a UAD, nobody needs a Pultec Eq, nobody also needs Synth1 or Toxic or SIR. Some, however choose particular tools and just get on with it instead of maoning about the tools others choose to use.

You can go take a dump if you think my comments were born out of jealousy. I was never moaning I was making succint points. If you're too obtuse to recognise that, then nothing else needs to be said.

[jupiter8]

Which competing DSP products use BlackFins ?

[stag]

AFAIK Virus Powercore is licensed per CPU, one of this CPU is capable of running 4 instances of Virus with 64 voices, that's not a plugin or two.
A power Core FireWire problaby has enough power to compete with 4 UAD, to my knowlledge they run flawlessly, two ca'n be connected on a single FW400 hub.

UAD decides to allienate its customers that decide to go for laptops in the future,well they tell us: "buy a Magma", which according to the very Magma, on a PC laptop, one has to be really lucky to find one that work.

Everybody knows about the limitations of FW, USB and even PCI. The Question is what is enough?? does a f**king DSP need more bandwidth than a harddisk to ru properly? i think not.

I have mine inside a Magma, only after buying this chassis they stoped to give problems, no wonder an antique hardware surely would find more problems to run properly at each upgrade. How come that now the 4 cards share the same PCI slot inside my board and finally they run like thay should???

When finally, next year, probably a laptop with 4 cores and 4gb of RAM hit the streets for under €2000, does UAD think or feels that they have not to change at a very short time span they development policy. it's everything okay then!!! that's fine by me, this is not the first time i got a bad deal, i hope it won't be last, i'll survive.

[mike goodwin]

you are NOT mad, you should sell them to me at a great price:)

$400 CAN bucks and it's yours! Project pack with a LA2A thrown in for good mesure. That's like getting the uad project pack for just over $300 bucks. Not to bad.