Universal Audio stuff

Jez6345789

I have been sort of getting together a new home recording setup after the old one was getting too old and cranky.
The old version was simply an old MacBook and Logic and to be honest, I did not bother much about anything else except the plugins and stuff included and used an Old Line6 interface which worked well enough for basic songwriting and scratching the recording itch. 

With the new system which will be a 6 core Mac book pro stacked with memory and SSD which happened to come my way.
Currently, I am just using the Helix as the interface and it seems good enough for my needs but keep bumping into Universal Audio stuff being used online think they have their product placement well sorted. 

When i first looked in to their stuff besides the price I liked the idea of the DSP onboard to help with running their channel strips and plugins digging deeper it seems the old Sharc DSP they use do not really let you do that much in terms of tracking with multiple effects and channel strips perhaps 4 is a realistic limit. 

See lots of positive views and they certainly seem very good but I am now wondering if the lack of DSP power makes them not worth bothering with the expense unless you go for one of the very powerful ones, which see, over the top for an at-home recording demo systems.

Any experiences about how many of their plugins you can run and  are they worth it 

thanks

octatonic

They are very good but it is a personal choice about whether the value is there.
There is for me, and I have pretty much all of them now.

I don't track though UA plugins most of the time- I have outboard for that.
At the mix stage I find them indispensable- they are some of the best emulations out there, especially Distressor, SSL and API and I have the hardware equivalents to compare them too.

Stuckfast

At the end of the day, you don't *need* UA, and it's never going to be the cheapest option. But the hardware and the plug-ins are very good. I've tracked through their preamp emulations when I didn't have hardware alternatives to hand and they sound fine to me -- not that it necessarily makes a huge difference. The more thirsty ones like the Neve 1073 do use up a lot of DSP which is why it's often better to treat them like hardware and track though them, rather than leaving it til mixdown.

I really like the fact that UA always officially license their emulations and pay royalties to the companies that made the hardware.

You *will* get sucked into spending a lot of money on plug-ins.

WiresDreamDisasters

I keep tossing up the idea of selling my Apollo x8p. They don't come with too many plugins when you buy one, but I was able to register it to my work account and use all our work plugins on it, which was great. The Distressor is one of my favourite compressors.

They're not the lowest latency cards on the block, but they're not terrible. And it has been the most solid interface I have ever used since I was a wee nipper! I will never go back to a USB2 soundcard I tell you that. I had endless problems with them over the last couple of years with cpu spiking and latency. The x8p is just solid.

But it's a lot of money. I'm using the DSP once in a while. Most of the time I'm still using plugins. The Console application that comes with it is great though, it really is. And I love being able to use virtual outputs.

So maybe the hit on the latency is fine. In practice it hasn't bothered me too much.

What has stopped me selling it is the resale value - it's not as high as I thought it would be.

PhilKing

I use it with 2 DSP cards (a duo and quad), and only hit the limit once (when I was first playing with it and I had lots of occurrences of Manley's Massive Passive, Pultec and Neve plugins on each channel.  I've had them for ages and upgraded from the old cards to the new cards.  One thing I still do have though is the 'light' versions of some of the older plugins, which lets you run a lot more on the new cards.  

gibsongretschfan

See unless you absolutely must have UA plugins- and Im assuming you dont- then honestly your Helix is fine. Money probably better spent elsewhere (monitors, room treatment etc)

Jez6345789

Thanks I think you have managed to talk me out of it as just getting the entry level interface Apollo Twin X is where I was looking and frankly as said by the time you have built up more plugins for what I am doing it’s money probably better spent elsewhere.

thanks

gibsongretschfan

Saved a life