UAD Spark Subscription model opinions?

[dionenoid]

Ya, it also means that any plugin that runs on a SHARC chip can already run on the emulation layer, so the limited set of Spark plugins is purely a business decision, not a question of certain plugins being ported and others not.

The funny thing is, using an emulation layer is not necessarily a bad thing, there may be some performance overhead, but it makes a ton of sense not to have to port and maintain additional native Mac versions and eventually native Windows versions of each plugin, but UA sure doesn't want anyone to know about it!

They said that Spark will be growing. I guess that means that more plugins will follow. It's all a bit vague, also weird how that UA rep answers questions on GS without really answering most of the times.

[dionenoid]

Anyway, i'm on Windows, so i guess i have to wait. And no answer yet if the UAD DSP plugins will be vst3 soon.

[vertibration]

I think it has to be an emulator. Im not sure if this is somehow connected, but if you want to test this out yourselves

1. Open the minimoog UA plugin in your DAW, try it in Ableton, or FL Studio as they both have Qwerty keyboard enabled options without an additional Qwerty pop up window.

2. Start to play the synth with your computer keyboard

3. Start to click on some parameters within the synth while playing the plugin with your computer keyboard

4. You will notice that Your Mac starts to produce a bleep sound every time you press a key on your computer keyboard

I think the all the native plugins must be running some sort of wrapper or something because OSX doesnt recognized the UI, so your mac emits a bleep noise everytime you hit a key. Clicking away from the plugin with your mouse gets rid of the bleep sound and you can continue to play your synth with your computer keyboard without a bleep

I dont know if this is somehow connected, but its very annoying

[shawshawraw]

Long story short, they talked about how they (much like every company other than UA that sells analog emulations) have technology that makes it so the DSP accelerators are no longer absolutely required for their plugins to work. Although the work offload is still a big plus, it was possible for everything in their library to run well natively on a high end CPU (presently at that time). Meaning, the emulation is absolutely 100% identical, and it had simply become a matter of what hardware was assigned the "work".

A comment on "100% identical," I did a null test inside LUNA comparing native vs UAD-2 a month ago, out of curiosity. API CS or 2500 showed a slight difference on attacks under fast attack speeds, and ATR-102 didn't null at all (probably because of modulation applied?). Other native 'extensions' sounded exactly the same even on extreme settings.

The results of 3rd party stuff were more interesting, though - some were exactly the same, some slightly different, and some completely different

[zvenx]

I am not sure about the emulation part.. I do recall, Gannon I believe, had said on uadforum a few years ago that they start their development of plugins natively then port and optimize them to the Sharc DSP chips.. He was addressing why they couldn't be released on native because their cpu usage was just too high.. (I vigorously disagreed with him and questioned their interest or lack therein in optimizing it for intel processors).

Its been a few years so I could be misremembering parts of the convo.

rsp

[trackbout]

I was unsure it was a SHARC emulation until they wiped all references to that Reddit post from the GS thread, that made it seem a lot more likely. It’s also strange that someone from UA doesn’t just go on the record one way or the other and put it to bed, but they seem to be treating it as some kind of state secret.

[zvenx]

But let me play devil's advocate. If it was an emulation why would that be bad? and UAD want to hide it?

I have been a UAD user, for the most part happy UAD user (my biggest gripes are the installer and the non resizeable GUI) since 2004, when the cards were branded Mackie. I still think their 1176, LA-2A and 175B and is it 176C are untouched natively.. I think for their other stuff some of the competition have at least caught up if not surpassed, so I am not a UAD hater.

But I find their hyperbola almost as annoying as IK MM and Slate's..

But I say all of this to address your on the record comment.. I don't' know how else to say this, but I find them very shady in this regard... When the 1176 Mk2 came out there was a slate comment that suggested not all the elements of the 1176 was correctly modelled in the mk2 by uad unlike his model.. so I asked UAD via email and they assured me everything was fully modeled. I asked them if I could post their email comments to clarify and make the issue moot, they said no.. Why would you say no? What possible reason would you say no, which would have ended Slate's argument?

Another example, from right here on kvr. When Arturia issued their Dimension D emulation, there was talk that the UAD one made up stuff because it had button combinations that changed the sound on the UAD plugin, that did not on the Arturia one. Arturia argued that their model was authentic.. I argued over and over, that the UAD one was endorsed by Roland and Roland would not have allowed them to state something like this incorrectly.. So I emailed UAD and brought the thread to their attention and asked for clarification... for over 4 weeks they strung me along answering everything but what I asked....conveniently I might add. (no speak english, kind of vibe)....eventually I gave up and told them, if they would like to correct the impression that UAD's plugin is not authentic in its operation re: the buttons to the hardware here is the thread they can do so..... They never did.

I find it shady... I am not sure how else to put it.

rsp

[trackbout]

Well if a company rep says something on the record in a public forum, I imagine there are different consequences than if they send one person an email. But your question as to why an emulation layer is bad, ya, that’s my question too! I don’t see why it would necessarily be something to hide, unless it was a major performance hit, but they must be ok with the performance of the native plugins or why release them at all? So ya, it’s super weird. But literally 25% of the posts in that GS thread are from a company rep, they are well aware that myself and other people were asking the question about it being an emulation layer, and they are very actively hiding the answer for some reason.

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

But let me play devil's advocate. If it was an emulation why would that be bad? and UAD want to hide it?

I have been a UAD user, for the most part happy UAD user (my biggest gripes are the installer and the non resizeable GUI) since 2004, when the cards were branded Mackie. I still think their 1176, LA-2A and 175B and is it 176C are untouched natively.. I think for their other stuff some of the competition have at least caught up if not surpassed, so I am not a UAD hater.

But I find their hyperbola almost as annoying as IK MM and Slate's..

But I say all of this to address your on the record comment.. I don't' know how else to say this, but I find them very shady in this regard... When the 1176 Mk2 came out there was a slate comment that suggested not all the elements of the 1176 was correctly modelled in the mk2 by uad unlike his model.. so I asked UAD via email and they assured me everything was fully modeled. I asked them if I could post their email comments to clarify and make the issue moot, they said no.. Why would you say no? What possible reason would you say no, which would have ended Slate's argument?

Another example, from right here on kvr. When Arturia issued their Dimension D emulation, there was talk that the UAD one made up stuff because it had button combinations that changed the sound on the UAD plugin, that did not on the Arturia one. Arturia argued that their model was authentic.. I argued over and over, that the UAD one was endorsed by Roland and Roland would not have allowed them to state something like this incorrectly.. So I emailed UAD and brought the thread to their attention and asked for clarification... for over 4 weeks they strung me along answering everything but what I asked....conveniently I might add. (no speak english, kind of vibe)....eventually I gave up and told them, if they would like to correct the impression that UAD's plugin is not authentic in its operation re: the buttons to the hardware here is the thread they can do so..... They never did.

I find it shady... I am not sure how else to put it.

rsp

What's shady about that? Support people are not public spokespeople for their company. I assure you, if I made any public statements about the internal operations of my company (nothing to do with audio), I'd be fired in a heartbeat. If you ever worked for a large company with PR people and HR people, I think you'd find that pretty normal. UA has a few people who are authorized to speak publicly, like Drew is doing on the UA Spark Gearspace thread, like Peter does for IK, but even then, these aren't the developers and they're surely limited in what they can say. Slate can say whatever he wants, it's his company. But a company like Universal Audio is going to hold things closer to the vest and have fewer people who can speak publicly about things. It's just the nature of the corporate world we live in.

[4damind]

I still have licences for several UAD1 plug-ins, some could probably be used as a native version for free (if available). But my interest is rather low and actually, I have no need for the UAD plugins.
This comes a bit late for me, IMO UA missed the boat years ago.

[fese]

I wouldn’t see a problem if they’d used an emulation or not for the native ports, if it works, it works…
I was just wondering as they stated that the DSP and native version are “exactly the same”, if that is actually possible without using a chip emulator. Afaik programming for sharc DSP is very different than programming for a modern general purpose CPU, e.g. their SHARK “only” has 32bit floats compared to 64 bit in x86-64 or ARM , which I suspect would result in different results with some DSP calculations (e.g. recursive filters) .
But that’s something for the specialist in the DSP subforum

Anyhoo, not really interested because of subscription. I had an UAD
2 years ago, there definitely were some nice plugins, but there is so much choice of excellent plugins available nowadays, it is not remotely tempting to me

[fese]

I still have licences for several UAD1 plug-ins, some could probably be used as a native version for free (if available). But my interest is rather low and actually, I have no need for the UAD plugins.
This comes a bit late for me, IMO UA missed the boat years ago.

I think they said in the GS thread that UAD1 plugins licenses are not eligible for the free native version anyway. So even if you cared, you wouldn’t get them

[zvenx]

...........

What's shady about that? Support people are not public spokespeople for their company. I assure you, if I made any public statements about the internal operations of my company (nothing to do with audio), I'd be fired in a heartbeat. If you ever worked for a large company with PR people and HR people, I think you'd find that pretty normal. UA has a few people who are authorized to speak publicly, like Drew is doing on the UA Spark Gearspace thread, like Peter does for IK, but even then, these aren't the developers and they're surely limited in what they can say. Slate can say whatever he wants, it's his company. But a company like Universal Audio is going to hold things closer to the vest and have fewer people who can speak publicly about things. It's just the nature of the corporate world we live in.

Yes, but if you don't want to give me permission to copy the email in public like you say, that is fine, But let those who are authorised to speak address the issue in public...

Both of those issues were in public threads (one on their unofficial forum which they participate in) which they could have easily gotten someone who is authorised to do so comment on, and put the issue to rest. When you let it fester like that to me it gives credence to what is being said on the thread.
rsp

[_leras]

Gotta say, big kudos to Universal Audio for this. I'm really looking forward to native versions of these and appreciate them giving owners of the plugins the licenses as freebies. Class act.

1. I'd be very let down if they didn't
2. It's kind of irrelevant as a PC user...

Is this any Mac or just the new ARM based ones? ARM I think are used in their recent pedals and I thought might have worked in new cards.

Native will be great though if it reduces the latency.

[vertibration]

A layer is bad because the UI on their synths when using a Qwerty keyboard will cause audible beeps unless you click off the UI. VCV rack plugin has a similar issue (except VCV becomes inaudible) and its because VCV rack consumes all keys (they are working on a bug fix).

Something is clearly going on with these native UAD plugins. They do need to address it