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Originally Posted by Mind-Over-Midi Could you elaborate a little? I'm about to buy the wrapper and do the UAD/RTAS thingy. What are some of the problems you are experiencing?
Thanks,
Bill.  |
Well, there's the thing about the latency, which means that in RTAS you can't have the UAD plugins engaged while tracking. But UAD reverbs have a special problem with RTAS.
With compressors and EQ's, you put one on a track and compensate with the Delay Compensation plugin; straightforward and works great. The compensation plugins don't cost any CPU according to UA.
But with reverbs, it's like this; (and this is true only when using a reverb bus, which is the only way I use them; it doesn't apply to putting a reverb on the track you want to effect, as if it were any other plugin.) You have the original track; say a vocal. Then a reverb bus with a UAD reverb plugin on it. The 'verb bus has latency, so you should compensate the original vocal track for that latency, right? Only problem is that the signal you're sending the reverb bus is now late due to the delay compensation. You can verify this by putting a reverb plugin on a bus and setting it to 100% dry.
The only solution is to mult. You have to set the original vocal track to 'no output' or mute it, then bring it up in another aux trak; that will be the dry vocal that you'll hear. Then you set up your reverb bus as usual, but don't send the signal from the Aux to the reverb; use a send from the original track to get it there, otherwise you'll have defeated the purpose of the mult. The reverb bus gives you the 'reverberated' signal with latency due to the plugin. The dry auxiliary vocal track now needs a delay compensation plugin set to '1 plugin' (the UAD plugins all have the same latency; the delay compensation plugins work in multiples of plugins, except for the Pultec Pro which delays: "one plugin and thirteen samples", or is it eighteen? I'd have to look.)
Since there's no processing cost in PTLE for using an extra bus, all you've done is use up one of the sixteen busses. It sounds like a pain, but I don't really notice it anymore.
Weirdly, I've never seen anyone refer to this. Could be that people don't use 'verb busses as much as I think; also could be that they're hearing the reverb effect with the delay caused by the 'verb plugin and not noticing that it's not part of the effect. If you're using UAD's in RTAS, and you're running a 'verb bus without doing this, you're adding delay to the reverb.
There'll be a test on this later.
So should you buy a UAD card if you're using RTAS? I think so. I sure wouldn't want to NOT have the Fairchild, the 1176, the LA2A, the EMT and the Precision Limiter.
In fact, I have two UAD cards. Incedentally, it would be better for us RTAS users who have fast systems to have RTAS native versions of the UAD plugins; I think the PCI ones hit the cpu harder than my native RTAS plugs.