UAD-1

[iomegaman]

Just got my email, as of Dec. 31 my UAD-1 (I have 2 cards and tons of plug-ins) will effectively be "non-supported"...while I appreciate the evolving nature of the business this strikes me as a bit unreasonable...I get the need to develop the other platform, I get the idea that you will not be focusing on the old platform and new plug-ins will not be forthcoming on it...my concern is "unsupported" seems to be a very sneaky way to say upgrade or suffer....maybe I am not seeing it right, but all of the conditions of support could remain in place without further development so why not just do that?

 

[pucho812]

unsupported for a anything related to computers and or discontinued audio hardware usually means until the parts run out or no one there knows enough to service a system,

 

[Pip]

Yet another reason why analog RULES!!!!!

I kid slightly but yes it is a drag and the audio world is traveling very quickly in the digital domain.

I have been involved in the recording studio biz for nearly 35 years. YIKES!!!! I actually love some things about digital audio. BUT!!!

I still own my first 1176 that I bought in '82. It's worth 3 times what I paid for it. I recently threw out almost $50,000.00 dollars worth of digital audio gear that had become totally obsolete. I still have some that ruly will never work with any OS ever again. UGH!!!!!

At least you got a run for your money. My UAD solo card. The one that worked in the express 36 slot. Yeah that lasted like a hot minute. Next casualty IEEE 1394 AKA firwire. Into the crapper!

 

[joaquins]

Yes, I'm going to buy a reel tape and let PT suck it! If it just came with the edditing power and all that would be awsome!

I really don't know what to do, I'm going to buy a new desktop machine and isn't happy about that, same with the soundcard, I don't know what to do because of this, buying FW today seems buying something old, get a thunderbolt is little hard and PT is way expensive for what it offers, there are better converters for that money.

Analog do rules, but today is a little hard work without digital, I do want to avoid as many plugins and DSP as I can, but I need a lot of converters for that. So the question is how to get a reliable digital setup that last for a reasonable time...

I really don't know, I always try to buy the newest and biggest machine so it last longer, 4770k is going to be my next one, but it could run 10 years and worth a coin at that time... even if it last it won't be up to date and will be using old OS and soft, but if it does a good job at the time it could continue working with old software and hard, won't worth anything at that time. I saw some G4 running tiger and PT 7.3 in some pro studios 2 or 3 years ago and they where happy with them, just ask them not to brake or you may have to change everything up to the toilet pipes. Now I'm running a 2007 macbook with leopard and logic 9 and it works, no more updates from chrome so I have to look videos with safari and can't install any newer soft but it do works, it's geting short for my job so I'm going for a big one, but 6 years of service for the smallest mac at the time seems to be good enought, the biggest should last longer I guess.

JS

 

[iomegaman]

Well yeah...the two UAD cards I have are PCI and PCIe so the older one is probably dust the next rig I build...currently I am happy with my 5 year old DAW because I put a ton of RAM in it but it is ONLY dual core as if that were not enough...frankly I have not used the UAD stuff to terribly much...and I will probably simply upgrade my harddrives to SSD before I build another DAW since this one seems to chug along just fine on Win7...

I noticed Apple seems to give less than a ratz-ass for audio guys, dropping and changing protocols like used socks...thunder-whatever to be the new emperors clothes...

I think most people are a little fed up with the rapidly worthless investments we call digital...I once heard a remarkable album made on a Pentium 3 running some old version of Cubase and Fruity loops, was unbelievably good going into a creative soundblaster card...the guy just knew how to exploit his limitations...

I like the rest of the world was hoping digital would circumvent my laziness and lack of genius...it only amplified them.

 

[pucho812]

Yet another reason why analog RULES!!!!!

I kid slightly but yes it is a drag and the audio world is traveling very quickly in the digital domain.

I have been involved in the recording studio biz for nearly 35 years. YIKES!!!! I actually love some things about digital audio. BUT!!!

I still own my first 1176 that I bought in '82. It's worth 3 times what I paid for it. I recently threw out almost $50,000.00 dollars worth of digital audio gear that had become totally obsolete. I still have some that ruly will never work with any OS ever again. UGH!!!!!

At least you got a run for your money. My UAD solo card. The one that worked in the express 36 slot. Yeah that lasted like a hot minute. Next casualty IEEE 1394 AKA firwire. Into the crapper!

Analog although having a longer life is still subject to parts availability. I know many a console owner who can no longer service their old SSL consoles and Neve VR's.

 

[helterbelter]

In the past 3 years, Universal Audio sent many, many offers for crossgrade through email to ALL registered UAD users, they already told that the UAD-1 won't be supported forever.
Offers like : pay 200 usd, and you get a UAD-2 solo (which is 2.5 times as powerfull as the UAD-1), plus a free plugin of a value of 150 to 200 usd.
Now the day has come that they won't support it anymore.

Man, I wish other companies did offer such support !
(TC ?, SSL ?)

In my opinion most of the UAD plugs are expensive, but I can't say the crossgrade offers were a rip-off.

A thing that I do regret about the UAD platform is that 32 bit isn't supported anymore with the latest software versions, but that's another story.

 

[iomegaman]

In the past 3 years, Universal Audio sent many, many offers for crossgrade through email to ALL registered UAD users, they already told that the UAD-1 won't be supported forever.
Offers like : pay 200 usd, and you get a UAD-2 solo (which is 2.5 times as powerfull as the UAD-1), plus a free plugin of a value of 150 to 200 usd.
Now the day has come that they won't support it anymore.

Man, I wish other companies did offer such support !
(TC ?, SSL ?)

In my opinion most of the UAD plugs are expensive, but I can't say the crossgrade offers were a rip-off.

A thing that I do regret about the UAD platform is that 32 bit isn't supported anymore with the latest software versions, but that's another story.

Yes I am not complaining about the offers, just that "not supported" was not necessary...and yes the 32 bit thing seems a little to head-strong...I think we've been duped into thinking more math is always better...and chances are I will probably take the upgrade before the year end since I have invested in a lot of software and it seems a waste to toss it out when I can upgrade for a somewhat reasonable gouge...

 

[okgb]

Sometimes " non-support " also means , we're not going to test it or qualify with anything, anymore
may or may not work , we're not going to consider it or pay attention, you're on your own  "

 

[iomegaman]

Sometimes " non-support " also means , we're not going to test it or qualify with anything, anymore
may or may not work , we're not going to consider it or pay attention, you're on your own  "

And that is exactly why I feel it is unnecessary...people all over the world have purchased a product with no implied "expires by date" when we bought it...maybe that was niave, but this was not cheap for me or anyone else who stepped into the equation...

 

[joaquins]

I belive the company should make public the source code of drivers and tools related to a hardware no longer supported, this way users could eventually keep it working and develop drivers and plugins for it, maybe it would be a nice way to let a hardware out of support without pissing everybody off.

JS

 

[Jidis]

I belive the company should make public the source code of drivers and tools related to a hardware no longer supported

Well, in UA's case, that's all tied in to the copy protection of the plugs so it might get messy. Even the UAD-1 has a bunch of neat stuff that's still for sale on both cards.

I've coincidentally thought about that idea myself though. I thought hardware companies should put together some sort of "Eternal Life" certification, where they turn over all the necessary info when they apply for EL, and it goes into protected holding. Then, should they ever cease to support the product (or at any time of their choosing) it all gets dumped into public domain for anyone who wants to work on it. Probably a million problems with that idea, but not being a developer of anything, my world is happy and simple.  8) 

 

[0dbfs]

Ha Ha! Yeah, I've got a UAD1. I picked up a UAD2q at some point when I needed PCIe more than the other X version.... My MoBo still runs both though and I keep them installed.

They stopped some support of the UAD1 already though. Couple years ago. I guess maybe they re-enabled it?

Tell you what, my other multi-channel audio interface died a little while ago and I've been fine with ITB. I'm still replacing the multi-channel I/O with an Apollo16/32.... Just sayin...

MacMini for the studio DAW, MBP for remote DAW (and mobile biz machine on different boot partitions), old studio ADK-PRO machine will turn into something.... Studio / multimedia machine, sample / vi player, business workstation.... I'll probably put an M-Audio delta interface in there since those are also supported in linux realtime kernel systems.

UAD1 will stay in there and I can freeze their software till it just doesn't work at all with other system and HW updates.... I'll bet I can get at least a couple more years out of it for some processing here and there.

Cheers,
jb

 

[Indecline]

We have 4 UAD1 cards in expantion chassis in both the A and B room. The A room is full of plugs so no issues there (it's been a sealed system for a few years now). I just got the B rooms together with no plugins but the 1176 and Pultec.

Sad to say, but you can't even BUY plug ins for UAD1 after Dec. 31st. So, unless I buy quickly, I basically have four cards to run two plugins.