The Sound Board

The Century Tube channel, native version, is free for a short while.

Early days for me with it, but my initial impression is that I won’t use it on everything, but certain things it will come in handy for.

UA Connect will launch every time you instantiate the plugin. If you don't like that sort of thing, delete all the UA Connect stuff once you're done installing. My UA plugs open fine without it. YMMV.

soundbylaura wrote: ↑Aug 20, 2024 6:20 pm UA Connect will launch every time you instantiate the plugin. If you don't like that sort of thing, delete all the UA Connect stuff once you're done installing. My UA plugs open fine without it. YMMV.

My mileage has happily been the same as yours, Laura. I found a very irritating thing with UA Connect - it would steal focus of an iLok Cloud session every time I powered up the PC. I have my portable pro tools rig on my Macbook Air, and I had to jump through hoops every time just to launch it, it took me ages to figure out what was going on.

UA Connect is basically just an installer. It doesn't even get involved with subscriptions - iLok handles everything. Once everything is up and running, I've had zero downsides and all upsides from deleting it.

Nice giveaway this, but obvs I don't need it. The UA Connect thing isn't a hard barrier to me getting anything else from UAD, but it is a useful disincentive. I have the LA-2A freebie for my macbook, I honestly don't think I need anything else from them now. I even have a fabulous RMX16 alternate in Wave Alchemy's Glow.

UAD make good quality stuff, but in my experience it is pretty much all inessential. Waves gets ragged on a lot, but they do have a fair few plugins now that are one-of-a-kind. I don't think UAD has anything like that.

Ah, the Connect doesn’t bother me, I just close it.

While I don’t miss the latency of the UAD-2 Quad, there are a handful of the plugins I would really miss, like the Capitol Chambers, Ampex ATR, Manley Massive Passive, Lexicon 224, and their compressors. They aren’t necessarily better than others but I am facile with them.

I don’t like Waves as a company, their business policies soured me on them, and I don’t know if it’s still required but for me the Waveshell was way more of a pain than the UA Connect.

Please pardon the OT, not sure it’s worth a thread:

I had the hardware LA-2A on a PCI-e card for years and it was my favorite compressor. There seems to be some warmth missing in the Native version (which I now have.) It could be my imagination, it could be a different mic, dunno.

Lawrence wrote: ↑Aug 21, 2024 10:25 am Please pardon the OT, not sure it’s worth a thread:

I had the hardware LA-2A on a PCI-e card for years and it was my favorite compressor. There seems to be some warmth missing in the Native version (which I now have.) It could be my imagination, it could be a different mic, dunno.

Before I removed my UAD PCI-e card from the Thunderbolt enclosure I compared the Native versions of the plugins I owned to the card based ones and I couldn’t hear a difference.

But that doesn’t mean there it isn’t .