PUCHO! You know when i went on the UA site for the update and saw this 610a/b thingy my 1st thought was what will Pucho post?? LOL
For me i love the UAD plug in stuff, by far some of the best sounding plug ins, however they are still plug ins, there are a few things that slightly concern me, heres an example; if i plug into my valve guitar amp and have a play and record it, it sounds nice, but then i record my guitar DI then re-amp it...exactly the same setup etc, well it doesn't sound the same does it? to me it sounds like a DI'd guitar through a guitar amp and thats exactly what worries me, now this effect to me is noticeable perhaps more on clean sounds than high gain sounds but i still can hear it, i think there is a word for this, i remember kingston posting on it something to do with transconductances and impedances interacting which can only happen when a live source is plugged into a valve amp or something (hope he chimes in).
Now with the UAD 610 pluggy (I'm just gonna use this as opposed to api unison cause its a valve emulation) i can understand if you have pre-recorded material you can add the algorithm and measurements of valves and transformers to the sound, infact the new pultec emulation does this, if you turn in on the mix buss it immediately gets brighter around 2-4k by 1db, i can notice this easily. Now this recording version which they call unison, i love the idea but my analdog brain says hang on a minute, now don't get me wrong I'm not trying to flame UAD here, but... so i record through their IC chip preamps into the apollo system or whatever, stick this 610 pre in unison mode onto it and its going to calculate the transformers, valves, impedance the valves transconductance (or whatever its called) and sound like an old skool 610 preamp???? I'm sure it sounds in the ballpark but what about all these other things that happen when you just plug your guitar into a valve amp or plug a mic into an old 610 without the ic chips and AD DA conversion.... just my thoughts oh Pucho man of power... it makes me wonder..
G