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Anaheim Hilton Hotel Concurrent with The 2019 NAMM Show Hands-On Training. Technical Presentations Career Development. Expert Presenters Location: Anaheim, CA USA Venue: Anaheim Hilton Hotel More info at the. As a longtime user of UAD, they're not something I would invest into at this point. I love their plugins, I still use them on every mix, but I think competitors finally caught up with the quality, and offloading the processing to hardware isn't as beneficial as it once was. If they aren't working in native versions already, they are in big trouble, as buying 'octo-core' DSP chips for $2k that are less powerful than a smartphone hasn't been appealing for the past several years. In the end, they are great plugins and a good company in general, but they haven't been worth the price of entry for a couple of years now - the exception being their Apollo series, which provides more value in the hardware.
But its downside is needing to be your entire audio chain to be worth it (super clunky to add to your existing setup just for access to the plugins, needs to be your primary interface at least). The reverbs are absolutely crazy. Their emulations are beautiful also. But as others stated in this thread.
Native plugins have caught up and if you get the slate everything bundle on the subscription. You'll be golden at like 5% of the cost. Slate even have verbs and delays now. I am an apollo owner and in the UA ecosystem and I personally love the zero latency and console app for my workflow but I don't recommend it to many people. Great piece of kit but only for a certain type of engineer. I do believe the emulations they do of the physical gear that they make themselves is top notch though.
You'll never find a la-2a/1176 emu as good as UA's. You can find a good version but it doesn't sound anything like what the physical unit sounds like.
The slate blue strip fet comp is pretty good though. I have a lot of plugins I'll keep using. Having zero or very very low latency is the priority now. I haven't tried thunderbolt but the ability to track thru a vibey channel strip with compression and eq would be awesome. Or to record a guitar with vst without hiccups. And the ability to do so on a larger track without freezing tracks. Not sure the best way to do this yet.
I'm currently using a gen1 ensemble and focusrite 18i20. Both fail in this regard. Time to upgrade I suppose. Slate plugins sound great but the cons are they are unstable as. If you get the everything bundle on subscription I believe every 12 months they give you a coupon to buy a plugin outright.
I think that's kinda cool. That being said if you were to buy all the slate plugins outright it would cost just as much as the UA versions so it's all apples n oranges at that point. Just gotta find what works for you and your system! I have the thunderbolt apollo and can confirm the sub -3ms latency is nuts.
I track vocals through a 1073 unison pre then chuck whatever plugins for the session I want. You can also make epic headphone sends with the apollo with pre fader fx e.g. This 'rental' model of Slate is great imo. If you compare the price to a Waves Mercury Bundle it is really nice.
Mercury costs when it is on sale about 2500 bucks (about 8000 when it's not on sale). An annual subscription of Slate costs 180. Even if you use Slate for 10 years you're still spending less money than buying a Mercury bundle. I never worked with Slate plugins and do not know what they sound like, but I hear great stuff.
I have the Mercury bundle and I know that it is really stacked. I think I'm not even using a third of them.
Uad Plugins Us Price Guide
But if I ever feel the need of getting new plugins I'll for sure check out Slate because of the nice price. Personally I prefer all-native. That said, my audio interfaces have limited DSP that I find very useful sometimes - RME UCX and RME Babyface have a great-sounding EQ that you can track and/or monitor through, and the UCX also has a comp/lim/gate/exp - so I can definitely see the appeal of the UAD stuff, because it offers a greater range of DSP. I think if you are concerned at the level you express, and I think down-time is a legitimate concern, you ought to consider a second unit as backup gear.
With analog gear you could fix or route around things onsite, but with digital, you are pretty much kaput if the unit acts up. I also use similar computers in both my rigs, so on some off-chance that the computer blew up, I could move a computer from one rig to the other.
My concern is if there is a visiting artist from out of town, that sort of thing. I have not had recording computer fail, but. Well- probably not a concern with computers because failure points are accessible, power supply etc. But on the one in a billion chance that the hard drive quit, I have a second machine at the ready, already set-up with identical DAW etc. Redux: If you like the Apollo, I think you ought to buy a second unit pertaining to 'lights on' 100% of the time. 'Got spare lightbulbs in the cupboard? It certainly is compact, but I just like separate units.
Uad Plugins For Synths
I may be in the same situation using a UFX w/ ARC as a monitor controller. If the UFX goes out, then I am in a fix, however I guess that is one reason I have an A-rig and a B-rig (two recording set-ups). When I was running PA, I was super obsessive about having backups for practically everything, console, EQ's, system DSP, cone and HF drivers, monitor wedges, spares for each of these. When a touring band is in town, day of show, you can not wait on parts, so to speak.
And it all breaks or goes haywire at some point.