The Universal Audio UAD-1 card has been one of the biggest success stories in digital audio products. After seven years it’s still going strong! But UA has cranked things up an order of magnitude with the astoundingly powerful UAD-2! The new card – actually a line of three cards – provides a huge boost in processing power as well as the new LiveTrack low-latency live monitoring/tracking mode. There are three cards in the family: The UAD-2 Solo, UAD-2 Duo, and UAD-2 Quad. So just how much more power do you get? The Solo provides 2.5 times as much power as the UAD-1. The Duo offers five times the power of the UAD-1. And the Quad offers – ready for this? Ten times the power of a single UAD-1. Up to four cards can be used in a single computer simultaneously, so a maxed out system with four UAD-2 Quad cards can provide a whopping 40 times the processing power as a UAD-1!
The UAD-2 uses Analog Devices SHARC floating-point chips to crank out DSP horsepower. It’s a PCIe (aka PCI Express) card that’s compatible with both Macintosh and Windows PC computers. It supports Audio Units and VST plug-in formats, with RTAS support coming very soon. At the time of this writing, as the UAD-2 is being released, most of the existing UAD-1 plug-ins had been ported to support the UAD-2, with the rest on the way. The UAD-1 will continue to be sold and supported with new plug-ins; you can also use existing UAD-1 cards alongside UAD-2 cards if you like. If you have older sessions that used the UAD-1, they will be compatible with UAD-2. All UAD-1 plug-in licenses you have registered with Universal Audio can be cross-graded to the UAD-2 free of charge through the end of 2008.
The UAD-2 will be available in a variety of bundles, all of which will include the Mix Essentials II plug-ins (Universal Audio 1176SE compressor/limiter, Pultec EQP-1A equalizer, RealVerb Pro Room Modeler, and CS-1 Channel Strip). The “basic” cards come with Mix Essentials II and a $50 plug-in voucher. The Flexi bundles include Mix Essentials II and up the voucher amount to $500. The Nevana bundles include Mix Essentials II and a $100 voucher plus the Neve 88RS plug-in (with the Solo) or all Neve plug-ins (with the Duo or Quad).
Best of all, the UAD-2 is IN STOCK and available right now! Call your Sweetwater Sales Engineer for complete information!