UAD-2 PCIe DSP Accelerator Cards

Prepare for Lag

If you want to use this card to the full potential, forget about it. Loading up a few plugins will give you 100+ms latency and if you want to use all the processing power on the card and fill up the effects/processing rack your going to get 700+ms latency. The plugins sound good, but the latency ruins everything good about the card.

UAD really needs to come out with a new card that allows for a lot less latency so the new generation will actually use this. Otherwise UAD will die with the boomers. I don't recommend this product. The only reason I give it 2 stars is that this is the only way you get get certain special effects like reverb or chorus or other special processor for a vocal. Only if you are working with a top artist and you absolutely need that exact tone on their vocal you know they are going to demand would you ever need this. But at that point if you are working with that kind of artist, you should use the real hardware and rent a studio that has it so you can get that iconic sound.

But for 99.9% of the time you cant use this, I recommend plugin alliance as they have all the same plugins and they run off your CPU and not these 20 year old sharc ships. You will have fractions of a millisecond per plugin instance with plugin alliance and you get just as good of sound.

Extremely Upset / Disappointed

I just received my UAD-2 PCIE OCTO. Installed it. Registered it with UAD. Went to go load up some plugins into the insert in the Apollo Twin USB Console and was greeted with the usual message explaining that there is not enough power to run the requested plugins. So I was obviously confused. Why did I just spend 1,200 on a pcie octo that promised to allow me to use more plugin power? I loaded the meter and control panel and it showed 0% usage in the octo and 87% usage in the apollo. I thought maybe I was doing something wrong. So I loaded up Ableton Live 11 and started loading up plugins. I checked back and all of the plugins in ableton were being powered by the octo and everything in the console was being powered by the apollo. This makes no sense to me. Why would you advertise this product the way you've been advertising it? You need to be 100% clear to us that we will not gain any power in the console by using this octo. I'm extremely upset about this. I also spent 1000 more on plugins and I feel like I just wasted 2200 bucks on this being that one of the main reasons I bought it was to increase my console power. So the problem I was dealing with has not been resolved. I spent 2200 and have the same issue I had before, the only cool thing is being able to load more into ableton, but why does it not work with my console? This is a huge flaw. You've been making this for years and years now, the next update better include a feature that allows you to power the apollo console with the pcie octo. Y'all better contact me asap about this.

Not working with AMD Ryzen Platforms

UAD-2 SOLO/DUO/QUAD PCIe cards are not recognized by AMD Ryzen (Threadripper) based PC builds. Whether this is related to AMD, the Motherboard suppliers or UA it is a shame how customers issues are handled. Reading through several forum threads and blog posts the issue seems to be related to a different FPGA- or board-design compared to the OCTO PCIe cards and it is not only the AMD Ryzen architecture which experiences these issues (2013 Mac Pro has the same issues and is based on an Intel architecture). So I would like to see that Universal Audio offer a trade-in program for customers who own SOLO/DUO/QUAD PCIe based cards. I am willing to pay the difference, UA does not need to offer the trade-in program for free. But since 2017 (!) loyal UA customers are being left alone with their UAD-2 issues on AMD Ryzen platforms.

Onto Card Review

I recently purchased my second Octo DSP card from UAD. I already have a Quad and an Octo card. While I enjoy the great plug-ins from UAD, their business model is growing old and out of date in my opinion. I bought 4 UAD 1 cards back in 2007 which became obsolete within a year or so of purchase. So I signed on to the UAD 2 model. With the advent of Channel Strip Plug-ins and such which eat DSP like a duck drinks water, this model just is too expensive to continue.UA would do well to invent or license from Sonnet their own DSP chassis that will take up to 3 or 4 Octo DSP cards in order to get closer to 'console' tracking with the Neve, API or SSL plug-ins. As it is, there just isn't enough to DSP unless you buy the Octo cards at $1,500.00 +.

Think twice before buying a UAD card. I have been a supporter for many many years and purchased the original UAD 1 extreme card which came with 32 plug-ins and cost a reasonable sum of money. UAD decided not to support this any further and offered $200 trade in (for a card that cost $1200 +) and had to purchase a new UAD Solo card for an additional $330. To add insult to injury, in the process I also lost 12 plug-ins that were on the UAD 1 and now are not supported. It also cost me time and money (round trip to my music store). I pointed this out to UAD and asked for extra plug- in compensation- they simply avoided the subject matter in their return correspondence 3 times. So I can't fault the plug-ins but be aware, this could happen to you

Brilliant emulations bugged down totally by completely redundant hardware 'accelerators' that introduce a bunch of problems and nuissances for the end user. Very big, unnecessary, latency-mared CP dongles. I stopped using my UAD cards altogether three years ago, and even though I really do miss them, I wont ever go back as long as your plugs aren't native. It's just too much trouble, and there's no point at all. I realixe that tc gave up on the porting, but SSL pulled it off quite easily (took one guy 6 months I believe).

Personally, I'd be back on the buying-UA-plugins rollercoaster from day one of native UAD. A lot of the plugs that've come out since I stopped using the cards look really interesting. Luckily, other software vendors have started making their own versions too – I'm a big Waves and Softube fan nowadays. Plug an iLok in whichever computer I'm working on, and bam I'm off. No chunky, silly hardware, no latency that makes it impossible to do anything but mixing with the plugs, no nonsense.

Please? Please please please?

:-)


PS: I've gotten a couple of LA610mk2s last year, they're GREAT. Haven't registered them yet, and now they're stuck in the rack so that will have to wait. Loving them, though :-)