On to the plug-ins themselves -here are just a few of my favorites. Plus, it can be used with third-party PCIe-to-ExpressCard adapters, allowing the super-convenient switch between desktop and laptop, if needed. I need a UAD-2 DUO or QUAD card in my studio Mac Pro tower, stat! Regardless, it's great to have the ability to run out the door with mix options in my bag and the SOLO/Laptop card works like a champ. I quickly found that, while I could instantiate a fairly generous allotment of the UAD plug-ins, I longed for more horsepower! These plug-ins sound huge, but the DSP price of that rich sound has an equally significant footprint.
VST, AU, and RTAS formats are all supported by the UAD, and my primary DAWs for testing were Logic 9 (Tape Op #74), Ableton Live 8.1 (#72), and Pro Tools LE 7.4 and 8 (#72). I opted for the laptop card for a degree of portability, and I was also curious to see what kind of mixes I could build on my rapidly aging Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro (running 10.6). The UAD plug-ins all run with UA's PCIe accelerator cards (which are available in scaled processor strengths) or with a neat ExpressCard-based laptop solution. This has to be one of the more challenging tasks given to me from the Tape Op High Command, simply because it's hard to pick just a few -they're all pretty awesome! So a while back, Andy asked me to pick a few favorites from the latest batch of Universal Audio's Powered Plug-In platform. I also asked senior contributor Dana Gumbiner, who recently added a UAD-2 SOLO/Laptop to his toolbox, to give us his comments.
Now that Neil has a UAD-2 DUO, I asked him to tell us which plug-ins he's currently relying on. JB and LC wrote reviews of the PCIe and laptop versions of the UAD-2 in previous issues (Tape Op #67, #73), and a couple years ago, Tape Op contributor Neil Mclellan and I wrote about our favorite plug-ins for the UAD-1 platform (#63).
As you've read in these pages, the UAD platform is popular with the Tape Op staff. But one product that I did make sure to install was my UAD-2 QUAD DSP Accelerator Card along with all of its plug-ins. That meant I could pull out some PCIe cards, keep some USB and FireWire devices unplugged, and forgo much of the hassle (and cost) of upgrading everything for Win7 64-bit compatibility.
Similarly, I didn't bother adding any plug-ins or accessories that I didn't find essential to my own projects. When I recently wiped the system disk of my primary music computer to replace Windows XP Pro with Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, I installed only the applications that I knew I'd be using regularly.
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