Universal Audio UAD-2 Satellite FireWire QUAD Core Reviews

Im Very please with the UAD 2 the plug ins sound great. Worth the Monday

Now is the time to purchase, it will give your projects that edge, the Manley plug ins (All of them) as well as the LA2, 1176, Pultec, as well as others are great. Im glad I upgraded, I was a UAD-1 user, finally upgraded and glad I did, they have improved 100% and are worth having. NICE..!

This is an extension of my Apollo which I love, but traveling the "Satellite" allows me to use some of the best plugins I own.

Purchased this for my MacPro. This really helped me to control DSP on my older Mac. I just can't let it go!
The plugs are great! UA is just a great company to deal with if you have any issues.
The UA plugs are a must need!

I had 2 UAD-1's and was just gonna let them go by the wayside and say goodbye to my UAD plugs but I was lucky enough to come into some dough right before the trade-in voucher was gonna expire. Now I wish I would have done it a long time ago. The new engine and plugs are by far the best I have ever used. More power than both of the UAD-1 with tons to spare.

Love this product and everything about it i own a satellite quad core. For one i love how it uses its own cpu and its POWER of 4 SHARC chips. Also great professional sounding plugins that change how you hear you'r music and it's very easy to use and its PORTABLE. The only thing is my interface the 003 rack my DSP is at 400 gotta get it at 800 so i can run more plugins. All i gotta say UNIVERSAL AUDIO trust in that name.

I got this as a promotion item for purchasing the 6176. I love the UA plugins, they sound great. Some things that I didn't like is that when you go to add a plugin to a track all of the available plugins that ua offers show up. so you may add a plugin that you didn't purchase which would activate a trial period of that plugin if you choose. I just wish that there was an option to just show the plugins that you purchased to save time. I made a list so I can refer to it. also the unit drops out every now and then, it's an easy fix, you just have to power off the device and power it back on. Another great feature is in the control panel for the quad core, it shows you all of the plugins that ua offers, the ability to purchase them with a click of a button and better yet, If you have a plugin that you want to know more about, just click on the question mark and it brings you to the plugins page where it tells you everything about it from history to what it is used for to the controls and how to use them. Great feature for a newbie like me with this unit. You can't go wrong with a UA product and Sweetwaters customer service and support is top notch.

The most analog sounding software in the business bar known!! Has definitely smoothed out and warmed my projects. Raises the value of my work and clients are loving the sound. A little expensive but the emulation of these classic hardware devices is as close as it gets without spending REAL money for these devices. Love it!!

About the UAD plugins. The UAD plugins aren't special; I did an AB comparison against WAVES using the PulTec EPQ-1A emulations and DID NOT find the sound quality of the UAD being better. The UAD version was more sensitive to adjustments but the difference likely comes down to the hardware units that were modelled. In fairness, UAD provided their "legacy" versions of the plugin with the "core" package and, from what I have been able to decipher from the available information, their updated versions are coded using superior circuit modelling methods. If that's the case, make sure you give UAD a big hug for giving you there old garbage for free if you make a spendy hardware purchase. The UAD plugin used the same amount of RAM as the WAVES plugin so you won't save anything there. The UAD plugins lack rudimentary features that I've come to expect such as one click arrow buttons to audition (scroll through) presets; you have to go through the menu selection each time to load a new preset. There is no AB comparison method built into the plugin either so if you want to AB different settings or presets you would need to instantiate the plugin twice and deal with the resulting audio cut-outs, etc.

About the UAD DSP offload concept. There is a reduction in CPU (eight core i7) demand with the UAD plugin versus the WAVES version but I was expecting more. There is a negligible delay in loading UAD plugins, no biggie. So far I haven't noticed a significant improvement in latency. Perhaps as the number of UAD plugins I use in place of conventional plugins goes up the payoffs will begin to appear but at $150 plus per plugin I don't expect this to happen over night, if ever.

About the UAD-2 hardware. If you are thinking of buying any UAD-2 hardware, especially the satellite versions and even more so if you are running a windows workstation, I highly recommend you either speak with a knowledgeable person first (such as a Sweetwater sales rep.) or visit the UAD website and read carefully the computer requirements for the device you are interested in. The hardware is extremely finicky; let me say that again ... extremely finicky. You can't use any of this stuff on a laptop and you can't use a native motherboard firewire port; it must be a firewire port interfaced via a PCIe buss. In addition, UAD only supports two PCIe firewire cards so even if you have a PCIe firewire port you might need to trash your card and buy a new one. If either is the case (you have an unsupported card or only have native MB firewire) then you should get the UAD-2 PCIe card instead of a satellite unit, it's much faster. If you are looking at Apollo, well good luck to you there as I have no experience in that regard but I strongly suggest you join the UAD forum and research the Apollo unit you are interested in as it relates to the specific computer platform you intend to use it with. In the case of running a UAD platform, that is if you intend to make their stuff the center of your audio engineering world, it might pay off to depart from the wisdom of 85% of the computer users in the world and go with an Apple/Macintosh platform as it seems this is the platform UAD have primarily focused their attentions on thus far.

Is a UAD system worth it? I would recommend NOT buying a UAD device to help an under powered computer; instead, focus your time and money on getting a better computer. With a state of the art computer you can run an incredible amount of standard plugins per project and get around the associated latency issues. If you are running on a state of the art computer and still need to find processing power (DSP that is) then UAD solutions might make sense; just keep in mind that they aren't the only game in town. At this point in my experience with UAD I would NOT recommend getting into the UAD platform just for the highly touted plugins; it would need to be about the DSP off-loading and not the plugin library. I am not sending my UAD-2 Satellite firewire unit back; it works, it does what it is supposed to do and it looks cool sitting on top of my AVID Mbox Pro interface ... but I am a gear junkie with a lot of disposable income and that might be the only reason I do not regret making this purchase. Only time, and a project that pushes my CPU to it's limit, will tell if the purchase actually pays off in a practical way.

Would largely avoid UA unless you have money to burn. Satellites and likely other drives don't always upgrade with computers so within a couple years this could wind up having to be replaced. Just be aware that the money you are spending here will not give you anything permanent.

I'm was disappointed when I needed to upgrade to Big Sur for a collaborative project only to find that my trusty Satellite Firewire Quad is now obsolete after Catalina! Every other device/plugin I own (including those from UAD)are working perfectly. Zero support from UAD, no warning given, no trade-in offered, just found a little blurb on their website after the upgrade saying it was no longer compatible. $ down the tube for a perfectly wonderful device!

I've produced for a long time and only recently purchased uad-2 devices. I don't like that they are tied to an OS. Maybe I'm spoiled with hardware, but there is plenty of self-contained hardware out there that won't become useless if you update your system which you will most certainly do at some point… all my analog hardware and even my hybrid hardware like Liquid Channel and Eleven Rack are always fine… I even have a Mackie 1620 with an a/d card thats 15 years and it still works great with new systems… but UAD-2 stops working after just 6 years - even though they are more expensive! But wait, there's more! In order to use it, there is an extra application layer to use beyond your DAW - just what you need for your workflow, right? - That's sarcasm - before UAD I could walk in my room, the Mac in my rig unlocks with my watch and I click record and I play. I don't want to fiddle around with a mouse and computer keyboard when I'm making music, I need my hands and attention free for instruments. And beyond that, I buy some plugins but have to search through all of them to fine the few I bought… again I have to hunt with a mouse to find the plug-in hidden in all the other ones they want to sell me! So to recap you have to pay for the privilege to turn your DAW into a storefront for UA, which quickly becomes incompatible, only to throw it all out.