UAD still worth it?

[mothra]

I swear, it's like watching some kid with Down's Syndrome walk into the same sliding glass door over and over when his mom is in the bathroom and can't come to open it for him.

Man, let me tell ya.. That really sucks when your mom lives like six hours away too.

[ghettosynth]

Well, in terms of the plugins in the Essential edition, which was quite cheap over the holidays, or Black Friday, or whenever I paid for it, I don't really hear anything super special.

I think that most of them are fine, nothing that blows me away. I don't care for the plate reverb, I have many others that I like more. PolyMax doesn't impress me at all. There are probably a few UAD plugins that I'd pay a similar amount for, but I don't think that anything that I have is worth a premium.

[Uncle E]

The Pultec is quite nice. Set the Low Frequency to 60 or 100, turn the Boost and Atten all the way up, and then nudge the Boost down until it sounds awesome.

The LA-2A is also awesome. The others, not so much.

[ghettosynth]

The Pultec is quite nice. Set the Low Frequency to 60 or 100, turn the Boost and Atten all the way up, and then nudge the Boost down until it sounds awesome.

The LA-2A is also awesome. The others, not so much.

They're fine. They were the main reason that I gave UAD a try as I don't have Waves installed and I don't know if I'm going to bother. I might have an IK version, I don't recall. I used to have a Cakewalk version, that's long gone.

I recently reinstalled everything and so many plugins have just been left out in the cold like so much digital landfill.

[noiseboyuk]

Someone should do a Phd on the psychology of Waves and UAD.

Both initially were the cream of the crop. People paid thousands for them and made great music with them. Then the cost cutting started, and simultaneously the plugins started to sound WORSE in peoples' ears.

[martinjuenke]

Someone should do a Phd on the psychology of Waves and UAD.

Both initially were the cream of the crop. People paid thousands for them and made great music with them. Then the cost cutting started, and simultaneously the plugins started to sound WORSE in peoples' ears.

People hear money, not music

[Hanz Meyzer]

People hear money, not music

This is obviously the case here. I admit there are a lot good sounding UAD plugins. Once had a UAD-1 pci card, loved dreamverb and some compressors for example (sadly not available as software). But that was arround early 2000s, and audio algorithms improved by a lot since then.

So what I hear are quite good plugins, but heavily stuck in the past and then also a lot too expensive and overrated. But this is their trick, creating an elitist club.

For most of their plugins, there are better sounding and more comfortable alternatives, which also mostly cost a lot less.

What I was a bit upset here is their selling strategy while sales. They hide actual details of the limitations, and you get a really annoying copy protection. Only that freebee, what was it, LA2A, has a stationary license and does not require internet. I don't think it is very useful, would always prefer a highly configurable Melda compressor over those hardware emulating compressors.

Also in the end, an audio workstation without internet is way more secure and also does then not require annoying regular maintainance like updates by Apple or Microsoft either to protect the user from their recently added bugs and their vast amount of obsolete system services which all are communicating with servers and though are security risks.

I understand people who have a professional studio and used UAD plugins since decades, and now want to continue to use it. What I don't get is why there isn't a boycott about the shitty copy protection and why people nowadays start to use uaudio stuff, if it is so crippled...

[jamcat]

I think when it comes to Waves, they were the only game in town. They began sounding worse by comparison to the newer plugins coming out.

But UAD still sound great.

[ghettosynth]

Someone should do a Phd on the psychology of Waves and UAD.

Both initially were the cream of the crop. People paid thousands for them and made great music with them. Then the cost cutting started, and simultaneously the plugins started to sound WORSE in peoples' ears.

To be clear, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that they're fine, but not necessarily anything that's game changing enough today for me to think that they're worth the UAD original prices, i.e., not "still worth it." If you compare them to what came with DAWs maybe 15 to 20 years ago, they're fantastic.

Even PolyMax is good compared to soft synths from 15 to 20 years ago. Today it's milk-toast.

So, sure, I'll pay the same $15 to $20 per plugin for things that I want from them just like I will with anyone else. I'll pay more for something that is really unique for me, but it's unlikely that I'll spend hundreds on anything from them. As far as unique things go, they're not even close to my first choice, but, nor is anyone else who focuses mostly on hardware emulation.

[PAK]

I haven't heard of a single dongle fail among my colleagues and my original iLok, the one that looks like a plastic key, STILL WORKS to this day. None of mine have failed ever and none of my peers dongles have failed ever

FWIW: Years back my iLok 2 failed. Luckily, on the 4th computer I tried it on, it recognised it and I quickly pulled the licenses off.

I was much more positive about the iLok 3 - until recently. I noticed the dongle activity light was going crazy. The iLok 3 was very hot to the touch. I saw it flashing so much because the computer was on the desk - If it’d been underneath, at the back of the machine, I reckon there would’ve been a very different outcome..

Something had went wrong between the dongle and driver using the current Apple Silicon drivers. I managed to find some other reports online about the iLok dongle being hot to the touch (Reddit, at least), and I’m confident this issue is likely to be killing some peoples iLok devices. So this is a current issue. Their driver needs some sort of protection to rate limit polling / alert when it experiences abnormally high activity. Until it has this your dongle may be at risk from this bug (at least on Apple Silicon / Sonoma, not sure about Windows)..

[PAK]

Re: iLok Machine Activation.. It is NOT an anymore effective copy protection method (versus alternatives like C/R), and cracking it will certainly be a mostly automated process at this point. Also, because UVI Falcon was cracked, they had to use extra copy protection on top of the existing iLok stuff (which was also cracked). I found this out when I went searching for the reason why UVI Workstation appeared faster (than Falcon) when switching presets. This additional layer of copy protection DAMAGED the performance of Falcon. When customers start getting harmed, by iLok’s copy protections, I’d say it’s certainly time to consider different methods..

The free LA-2A was obviously UA’s trial balloon to test whether the increased potential market size, gained from allowing it, would outweigh potential losses from piracy if they did so. So, if UA are going to switch to Machine based iLok, IMO they may as well remove iLok entirely and go with something better, along the lines of Arturia etc..

[Uncle E]

Both initially were the cream of the crop. People paid thousands for them and made great music with them. Then the cost cutting started, and simultaneously the plugins started to sound WORSE in peoples' ears.

I get your point that what was good 20 years ago should still be good now but that isn’t exactly the case. People were amazed by UA’s quality compared to other plugins but not necessarily compared to the hardware they were emulating. UA’s own MK2 plugins proved this because they are comparable to the hardware. Unfortunately, there are still many plugins that never received the MK2 treatment, including the LA3, Space Echo, Brigade, etc.

Having been a UAD user for 23 years, I own almost every plugin. I stopped using most of them about 10 years ago because native plugins had already started to surpass them. There are still around 20 exceptional UAD plugins but UA has an annoying habit of porting the bad ones over the good.

[Scotty]

This is where I have landed as well. I am drawn to the Unison technology as they have modelled some of the hardware preamps that I own with their Apollo interfaces. I find their reverbs and delays to be some of the best out there. They don't get top billing in other areas. I think that the dedication expressed by some here is a holdover from their effective marketing tactics. I used to drool over their product brochures and wound up owning almost everything they sold up to about 2018. I am very selective now as the competition has surpassed them in many areas. The recently offered lower prices and more efficient native format with side-chaining and VST3 is having me take a fresh look when they release something new. They are still relevant, just not industry leading.

Having been a UAD user for 23 years, I own almost every plugin. I stopped using most of them about 10 years ago because native plugins had already started to surpass them. There are still around 20 exceptional UAD plugins but UA has an annoying habit of porting the bad ones over the good.

[Agreed]

This additional layer of copy protection DAMAGED the performance of Falcon. When customers start getting harmed, by iLok’s copy protections, I’d say it’s certainly time to consider different methods..

Copy protection will always be cracked if there is sufficient interest to do so. People suck at making schemes that people can't crack. Maybe AI will do better, and then AI will have to crack it, which it will. What you're objecting to is really UVI deciding that having copy protection is more important than the user experience. That's always a trade-off, though. iLok copy protection methods have performance overhead, it isn't as much as some others but it's there.

There was recently a massive stink over AA's copy protection methods basically treating the user's disk space as fodder, blowing up already pretty big plugin installs to 5x the size or more. They claimed that it was done to prioritize speed of access over disc space efficiency, but obviously it was done to prioritize a big and inefficient copy protection method FIRST, then whatever local optimizations were possible after that occurred leaving the installs very large and performance most certainly affected. They're moving away from that to a degree, though, now that the copy protection was defeated.

But every method is, at some level, a burden on the user. We put up with it for the benefit of the companies involved, under the premise that by using it, they protect their sales, which leads to more developments for us. I can't overstate how much I appreciate developers who do not place this burden on users, but I understand the dynamics of the situation and why those who do, do.

I haven't had any issues with UAD native plugins just using an iLok 3 dongle, but that's a deal w/ the devil I already committed to, I still wish it weren't necessary and something better could be done but for the sake of convenience I do rely on it and I've got the damn ZDT.

[Uncle E]

I am drawn to the Unison technology as they have modelled some of the hardware preamps that I own with their Apollo interfaces.

The Helios is excellent. I would even say underrated. Of all their preamps, that one sounds the smoothest and warmest when it saturates.