Universal Audio UAD-1
A PCI card that took processing load off the host computer, and shipped with a small fortune in modeled studio gear attached.
Overview
The pitch was blunt. Your CPU is already working at full tilt, and all you need is a few more effects and a bit of high-end EQ on the lead vocal plus some warm, fat compression on the kick. That is the scenario Sound on Sound (January 2002, p.159) opened with when it looked at Universal Audio's Powered Plug-Ins package, and it is the best one-line summary of what the UAD-1 was for. It was a PCI expansion card with its own proprietary DSP chip, sold as a bundle with plug-ins. It pulled the processing load off the host machine so the sequencer could keep running at speed.
Universal Audio was established to further the vision of recording pioneer Bill Putnam, whose company was the first to bear the name. Putnam's sons Bill Jr. and James resurrected UA in 1999 and later merged it with Kind of Loud Technologies. The UAD-1 was the company's two-pronged approach made physical: carefully re-created analog hardware on one side, native-style plug-ins on the other, with the card acting as the bridge. The plug-ins ran exclusively on UA's DSP cards, and no third-party plug-ins were ever available for the UAD-1 or its later PCIe sibling, the UAD-1e.
The card's stated horsepower is the number that sold it. UA claimed its proprietary DSP chip offered 10 to 15 times the horsepower of a Motorola 56,000-series or SHARC DSP chip, with greater than 32-bit floating-point processing. The manufacturer was notably guarded about these figures and declined to publish full chip specifications. According to UA's own claims, that bought enough headroom to sustain as many as eight RealVerb Pro instances, or 32 EQs, 11 compressors, and 3 RealVerb Pro plug-ins simultaneously without draining the host CPU. Plug-ins could be controlled in real time without zipper noise or other artifacts, and they ran alongside native plug-ins without conflicts.
The original Powered Plug-Ins package carried a price of $995 and bundled the card with Kind of Loud's VST versions of RealVerb Pro, the Vintage Compressor 1176LN, the Teletronix LA-2A, and the CS-1 Channel Strip. The initial release supported Windows VST host applications only - Windows 95/98 or ME, on any Pentium-based machine with 128 MB RAM and a spare PCI slot. A Mac OS release was promised for the third quarter of that year, supporting both VST and MAS. A VST host such as Steinberg's Cubase VST, Nuendo, or Emagic Logic Audio was required. EQ (March 2002, p.37) printed the support matrix as it stood then, listing Windows 98, ME, and 2000/XP against Cubase, Logic Audio, Nuendo, and Wavelab, with Mac OS marked "very soon."
UA kept packaging the same card into bigger bundles. The Project Pak, announced at $499, was the entry-level route: the cross-platform UAD-1 card plus 15 version 3.5 plug-ins, including 1176SE, Pultec EQP-1A, RealVerb Pro, CS-1, and Nigel. The CS-1 suite modeled a complete channel strip - EX-1 EQ and compressor, DM-1 delay modulator, and RS-1 reflection engine. Nigel furnished amp and cabinet simulations, echo and delay, a modulation filter, and a phase-shifter. Buyers could expand with additional plug-ins such as LA-2A, 1176LN, Fairchild 670, Dreamverb, or Cambridge EQ. The card was compatible with PCI and PCI-X expansion buses, could run alongside other DSP cards, and as many as four UAD-1s could be installed in a single computer. Plug-ins supported VST, DX, Audio Units, and MAS hosts across Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, and Windows 98SE, 2000, ME, and XP. The Project Pak included a UAD-1-specific version of FXpansion's VST-RTAS Adapter for Pro Tools users.
At the top sat the Ultra Pak at $1,495 - the card plus UA's entire collection of 24 dynamics and effects plug-ins, billed as a significant savings over buying each separately. The roster ranged from the CS-1 channel strip and Nigel to the Plate 140 reverb and the Precision EQ mastering equalizer. Several plug-ins used proprietary modeling techniques to emulate vintage analog units including the Pultec EQP-1A, Fairchild 670, UA 1176LN, and UA LA-2A. Ultra Pak supported sampling rates as high as 192 kHz and as many as four cards per system, running in hosts supporting VST, RTAS, MAS, DirectX, and Audio Units. A Studio PAK later packaged all 20 of UA's premium plug-ins, including the Fairchild 670, LA-2A, and 1176LN & SE compressors, according to EQ (April 2004, p.106).
The architecture had a real cost, and it was latency. The plug-ins ran off a PCI card rather than in the host, so noticeable latency was introduced. Most hosts that supported the UAD-1 offered automatic latency compensation, though even in Digital Performer 4.6 one reviewer still hit slight latency problems. Pro Tools LE had no latency compensation at all, which forced aux tracks and dummy plug-ins to sync everything up - a workaround the UAD-1 manual described thoroughly. The verdict was that the latency was a slight annoyance, a very small price to pay for the aural benefits.
The Plate 140 reverb is the best example of those benefits. In an A/B comparison against hardware plates, the plug-in held its own for depth and resonance despite the varied sonic character of the metal originals, and it flattened the plate presets of a standard reverb plug-in. Against a convolution reverb built from impulse responses of famous hardware plates, it came out roughly a draw, with a slight edge to the convolution unit for offering more plate choices.
Compatibility widened over the run. The UAD-1e moved to the PCIe bus while keeping the same custom DSP chip as the original card, and the two could coexist: a PC with both PCI and PCIe slots could mix a UAD-1 and a UAD-1e. By the UAD-1e era, plug-ins ran at sampling rates from 44.1 kHz to 96 kHz, with all but a few also running at 176.4 and 192 kHz, and a system could contain as many as four UAD-1e cards. The UAD-1e was supported on Mac OS X Universal Binary and Windows 2000/2003/XP, worked with native hosts only, and supported RTAS in Pro Tools via a free FXpansion VST-to-RTAS adapter, but never TDM. The five plug-ins that shipped with the UAD-1e Expert Pak - CS-1, 1176SE, Pultec EQP-1A, Nigel, and RealVerb Pro - were the same five that originally shipped with the UAD-1.
For anyone buying today, the card only runs UA's own plug-ins, on operating systems and host versions that have long since moved on, with authorization tied to an era of software that UA no longer supports in the same form. The hardware itself is a single PCI or PCIe card with a custom DSP chip, and the value in a used purchase sits almost entirely in whether the accompanying plug-in licenses transfer.
eBay Listings
As an eBay Partner, we earn from qualifying purchases. This helps support our independent vintage technology research.