Universal Audio’s new Powered Plug-ins are the first offering in the UA Digital product line. They were announced at this week’s NAMM Winter Show in Anaheim, CA.
The Powered Plug-ins are a family of DSP-intensive plug-ins “powered” by the UAD-1 PCI card. The UAD-1 brings ultra-high computational processing to host-based systems, outperforming the DSP hardware engines of today’s popular high-end DAWs, according to Paul Rice, Universal Audio president.
The UAD-1 card utilizes a single proprietary high-speed DSP processor. The end result is a quantum leap in performance giving native workstation users the experience of using professional quality plug-ins with multiple instances unencumbered by the limitations of the host processor, Rice added.
“Host-based workstations provide an excellent and cost-effective editing/mixing platform. But to date, key DSP processes such as reverb, EQ and compressors have been hampered by limited processor cycles” Rice said. “Powered Plug-ins brings the professional, a no-compromise audio experience to the native DAW user at an affordable price. The UAD-1 card contains a single, ultra high speed chip enabling UA engineers to be limited only by their vision and not the technology.”
Available in April for US$795, the Powered Plug-ins Pro bundle features Kind of Loud Technologies’ stereo reverb, RealVerb Pro; and includes the UAD-1 DSP card, EQ-1 EQ module, CX-1 compressor module, MD-1 modulated delay module. This initial release will support the VST/PC format. Support for the RTAS (Mac and PC), VST/Mac and MAS formats is in the works.
Universal Audio also announced the development of Vintage Compressor, the first addition to the Powered Plug-ins family. Vintage Compressors will be the first in a series of analog emulation plug-ins that will encompass compressors, equalizers, amp modeling and synthesis. They’ll be available in quarter two of this year.