Universal Audio UAD-1

What motivated me most to the purchase is the ratio of the universally recognized quality plug-ins and used the UAD-1 price.

As I make music exclusively based synths and thus most of my sounds already undergoing treatment at the base, I'm not necessarily a fan of hyper processing and overproduction, so purchase a UAD-2 Quad seemed a bit superfluous.

In short, access to AU plugs for 85 euros seemed a good Cygnus. In practice, I'm pretty happy and I'm planning to take a second to increase my processing power at a lower cost ...

I'm on PC (W7/64) with a Core2Duo at 3.00GHz, 4GB of RAM, an SSD for the system and discs HSS sATA 7200 rpm for the rest. Nothing extraordinary, and with Cubase 5.5 / Reason 7, it runs well enough to make me happy.

UTILIZATION

I use these plugs in Cubase 5.
Latency does not bother me because I use at the mixing stage, where we can afford some latency without much impact.
I never encountered any crash, and within the limits of my power DSP PCI, the use of effects is totally transparent.

It works and it sounds. What more?

GETTING STARTED

No worries when installing from the moment you take the 5 minutes necessary to read the explanations in the manual.
I bought this card used to AF, I created my account from Universal Audio and transfer of licenses plugs posed no worries.

In short: no problem on my side.

OVERALL OPINION

So it's a year and a half since I bought this UAD-1, and although the power of a single card comes quickly to its limits, it works and it sounds.
I'll buy another one to give me more room and power, hop, it will nickel!

Our purchase t motivated by exceptional quality audio processing, such as the 1176LN compressor!
We use the UAD-1 all levels: track EQ, Mastering, Audio Restoration and of course pre-amp guitar (for personal use!)
We have two cards installed on 1 motherboard ABIT BX133 Raid on the one hand and an ASUS TUSL2-c-2 teams of all Intel PIII 1 Ghz, 512 RAM and HDD IBM
We possdons a 100% DIGITAL COUNTERS sytem, ​​without mixing desk with Genelec monitors.

UTILIZATION

You must have a computer (Mac or PC) trs clean with, preferences 2 free IRQ, because it takes absolutely no conflict or sharing with this card. Otherwise, c is super simple! !
No incomptabilit ...
The config is super simple because it is an executable file that takes care of everything.
The manual is in English ..... But hey, who bought a UAD-1 gnral knows how this type of effect

GETTING STARTED

The new versions are trs propres.Sur XP Home / Pro no Mac OS9 soucis.Sur ditto
No we have not test version MAS.
We work with Cubase SX, Nuendo and Cubase 5.1 WAVELAB4.0
We work 1.5 ms latency.
We can read about 200 tracks and 180 in 24/44.1 24/48, we have 16 tracks acquisition simultannes

OVERALL OPINION

T we have used in the first, we had a beta version by Steinberg France.
We compared the TC Power Core.
The report quality price is fabulous! especially when one compares the prices of Universal Audio!
We refer this choice for our next computer!

Asus P4G8X Motherboard, 1GB RAM, P4 2.4 ghz

UTILIZATION

No problem on my PC, Windows XP ss
Doc English peoblème ss. No complaints

GETTING STARTED

Use side I'm pretty disappointed with the little that can be loaded. I who also creamware cards (cards so as dsp), I have a much higher computing power. I think that at least three cards if you want to work seriously. I have pointed out (y 'fans uad on AudioFanzine ...) that the powers of calculation are not the same. That's true. But just as one can not compare a Mac to a PC with 2 GHz to 2 GHz, the two DSP cards and architecture are different. Morality? I only see that I was able to manage larger projects with excellent sound while uad arrived quickly at the cleat. Course offered plugs are great, but at the cost of power soon reached. Note that universal audio has the honesty to show on their site what you do with a map. When using large plugs that kill ... well they kill fast the process is normal. Some high-end plugs creamware eat up most of the bandwidth (eg reverb produced by sonictimeworks P100), but rarely much power dsp.

OVERALL OPINION

The quality of some plugs (comp, EQs, ...) is excellent. Other plugs are means (eg some reverb guitar amp simulation or far behind my Dynatube of creamware). I would say that sin is that it costs much faster if you want to use the plugs with dignity because computing power is quickly wiped out by plugs very good but very greedy. Uad I dropped and I only keep my cards that offer me Creamware:
- Excellent effects emulations (including the 3rd party) but also
- Emulations of synths that send B4 emulation and other native instruments in the closet! B2003, Minimax, Pro-12 etc. ..
- Without forgetting that the uad (unlike creamware cards) do not provide the I / O hardware with converstisseurs. All this is expensive to have very good effects (EQ and compressor). It's a personal choice that depends on your budget and the number of PCI or PCI-e available. The ideal is to have a UAD port PCI-e and one or two cards for creamware synths, rooting, reverb, etc ... Finally, in my opinion!

Asus, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2GHz, 2GB corsair ram, Win XP Pro, Cubase SX3.
Sound card pci simple. Warning plan to buy a second card, with a single one is quickly limited freezer tracks in Cubase SX is a temporary solution.

UTILIZATION

No problems with installation, you install the card, the latest drivers and presto!
Especially not reach on time as I did because of a virus sasser ##*"% c ... otherwise you lose all demos 14jrs. Reinstalling Windows does not change it ' is too late. To believe a change is made on the chip card itself, finally I do not know ...
Only the purchase of plugs is a bit complex, because you must register and go through a lot of manipulations tt a little long pr get a file that allows the plug purchased.

GETTING STARTED

Very good drivers, no crashes & really they are often updated.
With one card, you can count 6 or 7 & 1176SE compressor is full. It may sound little but nothing that buying one of these compressors is up to € 1500 so no worries.

OVERALL OPINION

The sound is terrrriible! Really no comparison with the waves plugs that were already very good. We can compare the solution to the UAD hardware (I even had a dbx160a I sold).
Compressors 1176 are extraordinary, they compress the heat added monstrous & vintage, very musical. The Pultec is magic, he adds emotion to bcp a voice made for example, is simply beautiful. The precision limit also amazing, the L3-bye! In short the next purchase flat 140.
In short go for it, I never heard that a computer ds. My mix has a pro now and his vintage hot side is very significant. Universal Audio has been very strong.