Mackie UAD-1 VST PC

Been a pro for 20 years. Producer/engineer/songwriter/singer/player

Easy

Amazing. Some of the best sounding plugs available today.

I have 3 of these cards. They are some of the best plugs out there. The Waves SSl is also very good though and I now use that as wel as the UAD.

I've been playing guitar for 20 years; writing and recording for 12 years. I sing, play guitar, bass, keyboards, and drums a bit. This was the Mackie UAD-1 with the 3.0 version of its plugins. I was using it with Cubase VST/32 version 5.1 release 1 on a Pentium III 800 Mhz machine with 512 MB of RAM running Windows 2000. My interface is an Echo Mona.

The UAD is relatively easy to install. There is a separate configuration application, which runs external to your DAW (digital audio workstation) app. It's not terribly intuitive, but in all fairness, I never cracked the manual. The plugins themselves are as advertised: the exact likeness of their hardware counterparts, and hence relatively easy to use.

The hardest part was getting it set up to where the plugins used the UAD CPU as opposed to my computer's CPU. That took an hour of tech-support time, as UAD is apparently not tested on VST/32, but only SX.

The biggest caveat with this thing is that it doesn't offer as much CPU power as one would hope. If I'm paying >$600 for a PCI card to do only DSP, I expect some muscle. As it was, certain key plugins (the guitar processor and the reverb most notably) very quickly chewed up CPU. Whether it was weighing on my CPU or that of the UAD, the guitar processor ALWAYS added 50% to whatever the current rate was. If you're already handling 24 tracks of audio and various other minor EQ tweaks and compression and reverb, you don't that kind of bandwidth to spare.

The trick is that Mackie specs everything out at a 48,000 sample rate. And, admittedly, this gives you twice the processing power. But it also gives you half the sound quality on the basic track itself. So it's not worth the trade-off in my book. Utlimately, the amount of processing power this thing DIDN'T have, compared with the overall underwhelming sounds that it did, didn't justify $700 in my book. I returned it.

I primarily tested three aspects, the CS-1 channel strip, the LA2A and 1176LN compressors, and the Nigel guitar processor. The Nigel was the unexpected champ of the bunch. Whereas I typically capture guitar on two tracks so that I can get a bit of a stereo spread by panning the two tracks to either side, the quad chorus on this thing made a single guitar track sound phenomenal. Does it sound as good as the original? First off, I wouldn't know: I'm not a connaisseur of tube amps. However I will say that it sounded tons better than a friends Line 6 Pod over the course of much comparison. It has lots of different cabinet settings which all seem fairly realistic. Very nice tool. MAJOR CAVEAT: you can't track with it. So while you might typically get an inspirational rush from playing with a great sound, with this deal, you're tracking with your puny direct sound and then processing afterwards.

The compressors and channel strip were warm-sounding, but nothing that just blew me away. I had really expected to be wowed by these, but, to my untrained ear, the Sonic Foundry compressor I have sounds just as good. Perhaps if I had a chance to play with it in the context of a complex mix, it would have really shone. But, as listed in "Ease of Use", the sounds it did offer were not so impressive as to justify the amount of CPU overhead required to run them.

If you have a P4 2.4 Ghz machine or better (maybe a multi-CPU server?), this thing is probably worthwhile. Since you CAN shift its processing to the host CPU, that would give you enough juice do actually do something with it. Or, of course, you can buy multiple UAD cards, which is supported by their latest release. Of course, they're not exactly going to give you a volume discount for those additional cards... So if you're a mere mortal like me, it's probably not worth the price tag.