What additional plug-ins does UA have planned?
Please visit the Universal Audio home page for the latest software development announcements.
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What chip are you using?
That's a question we prefer not to answer, as the focus of Powered Plug-Ins is not the chip, rather its our ability to bring forth a new level of power and performance that in the past was only available for those with extremely large pocketbooks.
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What will give me better performance: an upgraded CPU or UAD Powered Plug-Ins? How about dual processors?
UAD Powered Plug-Ins will give you the most dramatic performance increase you have ever seen. Period.
A faster processor or dual processors alone will give you only a modest performance increase. In order to really boost your performance, you must also replace all your hard drives and upgrade your motherboard and main memory. Not only is this expensive, it's a hassle! You'll have to reinstall and reconfigure all your applications and hardware drivers, and re-register all your plug-ins! Once you're done, you'll be able to run a few more tracks and plug-ins, but your system will still be as sluggish and unresponsive when it's overloaded as before. UAD Powered Plug-Ins give you a dramatic performance increase now!
UAD Powered Plug-Ins are comparable to the price of software bundles alone. In addition, running processor-intensive functions such as reverb and compression as Powered Plug-Ins on the UAD will free up your host processor for more tracks, native effects and increased mix automation which may be just the performance boost you're seeking.
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Can the UAD run alongside other DSP cards (e.g. TC PowerCore, Creamware Pulsar, etc.)?
Yes. Many users have reported success using the TC PowerCore, Korg OASYS, Creamware DSP, and Yamaha DSP Factory cards concurrently with UAD Powered Plug-Ins. The UAD card is fully compliant with the PCI 2.1 specification.
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Does the UAD card include I/O?
No, it is a DSP card used to run the Powered Plug-Ins. However, there are no known compatibility issues with popular I/O cards and devices.
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What is UltraDither and why should I care?
This is just one of the many advantages to using a single "super-computer" DSP chip. There is so much overhead on the UAD that we are able to implement dithering at every step of signal processing without any impact on the plug-ins or host software. Like other DSPs, the UAD uses high-resolution internal data values during its calculations. However, this data must be "bit-reduced" to match the resolution of the output signal.
Most general purpose DSP chips, like the Motorola 56K or Analog Devices SHARC employ simple rounding or truncation techniques, which have a noticeable impact on audio quality. Software developers who use these chips could apply valuable processor cycles to implement software dithering. However, most don't because it will limit the number of instances and compromise the performance of the algorithm itself. When you see "high-resolution processing" specs, beware: it's meaningless if dithering isn't applied in the processing and to the output signal. The UAD chip was designed with ultra-high quality audio processing in mind, hence the headroom for hardware dithering at every step of the process with no compromise to our software algorithms.
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How do Powered Plug-Ins help with latency issues?
Latency is defined by the hardware I/O buffer size you've specified. However, host-based (non-powered) plug-ins and many audio I/O cards can't support small buffer sizes without causing the system to run slower, so you're often limited to how small a buffer you can actually use by how many plug-ins you're running.
With Powered Plug-Ins, you can actually use small buffer sizes without reducing system performance because they use almost no host CPU power. Powered Plug-Ins bring real-time performance to your native workstation.
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Are there any plans to make 3rd-party plug-ins available for the UAD?
No. After much internal debate and a lot of market research we have come to the conclusion that making the UAD a platform for yet another plug-in format is not the approach that we want to pursue. The unique design of the DSP chip used in the UAD offers unprecedented power, but also requires Universal Audio engineers to code any 3rd party plug-ins for it. At this time we feel our engineering team would benefit our customers best interests by continuing to create our own next generation plug-ins that are simply not possible using competing DSP cards.
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