Considering Xite or UAD Apollo - cons and pros please?

[garyb]

doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
two sets of asio drivers...

it'd be easier to do in the studio. i'll bet live would be a clusterf...

[dawman]

I guess I will keep the RNPs and PCM70 then.
I hate it when I can't find a way to spend money I expect to see soon.
But then again I always go shopping with 1000 cash in hand and usually end up leaving with a Garlic Pretzel and Nacho Cheese.
Tight fisted when it comes to certain things.
Looks like the new Behringer controllers and the QuNexus will be the extent of my big spree.
Plus the dNa stuff. Thought I would have got that by now, but haven't sold property in years, it's a major PITA dealing with middlemen and gangster tax collectors.

[Bud Weiser]

I only say this becuase 2500 USD is a fair price to have that many mic pres and the reverbs are a step above Scopes actually, even a good replacement for my Lexicon hardware.

I just can't tolerate that Native Reverb quality,

Who needs reverb live ?
You´re a keybordplayer aren´t you,- or do you the FOH thingy too ?
My experience as a keyboardplayer,- f##k the reverb and use delay only.

When I read USD 2500.- it seems to me you´ll pay that only to be the guinea pig ...

and only feel that Native should use synths that we don;t have in hardware or Scope, but most importantly sample streaming.

I fully agree !

Bud

[Bud Weiser]

How would the routing work ? From UAD mic pre audio would have to travel thru its control panel which probably won't see XITE as a Dest so then has to go via host software then by ASIO to XITE. Maybe not optimal latency wise - that's the whole thang bout UAD there will always be host software handling involved.

Yep, I think that´s it routing wise ...

Otherwise your left with an ADAT solution whîch might be OK at 48KHz but if your working at 96 then your gonna tie up both XITE adats in order to capture Apollos 8 mic pre isn't it ?

I'm just guessing here since I don't have Apollo / just reflecting what I'd think about before blowing 2 or 3 large - I believe the thunderbolt is extra $$ .

I think Jimmy should buy something like a RME Octamic II and connect to one of the ADAT Ins of XITE-1 and that´s it.
Give a s##t on the UAD reverbs, he own´s the real Lexicons anyway.
At least using the 2nd ADAT for another AD/DA enables usage of the real hardware together w/ XITE-1 and SCOPE environment routing,- or simply use a A16mkII AE for all and connect mic-pres w/ their analog balanced outputs.

Bud

[Bud Weiser]

... I always go shopping with 1000 cash in hand and usually end up leaving with a Garlic Pretzel and Nacho Cheese.
Tight fisted when it comes to certain things.

Bud

[dawman]

Reverb is crucial on these damn carpetted stages, especially using samples instead of real instruments, like Acoustic Guitar parts, Horns definately need a nice Gated Verb.
My PCM70 sounded like crap on the Scope Cards, so I bought the PCM90 and immediately noticed it was a different bird, but sounded better than Scope or the 70.
It wasn't until the XITE-1 and the new specs. on the analog I/Os did I hear that long lost reverb I was missing.
The only thing even close to it is the UAD 224.
But GaryB's right, I don't need the extra headache, and a laptop should shrink everything down to suitcase of shallow racked hardware, and it'll last me.

Alright, so I guess I need something to bitch about, where the fuck is Scope 6.......
And UAD was close but no cigars. Just found out it has latency, but their new UAD NAMM offering is suppose to fix that...
Why bother, I have an XITE-1...

[Bud Weiser]

Alright, so I guess I need something to bitch about, where the fuck is Scope 6.......

Ha, ha,- you kill me ...

Bud

[fraz]

Do UAD offer more plugins overall than what we have on Scope / Xite?-

UAD don't have synths and samplers (but these don't work on 64 bit yet.....this will change in Scope 6 right?)

[Sounddesigner]

It's not even comparable. By FAR SCOPE has more plugins than any other dsp platform. UAD only has about 65 plugins. Look at all your SCOPE stock plugins alone, then go to John Bowen, Wolf's, DAS, Spacef, dNa, wavelenghth, Adern, Celmo, GOST, etc websites and add up all those collections of plugins and you'll see it's not even a close comparison. Then there is S|C's own additional plugins like modular 4 (Modular 4 is like having many plugins since it has 97 modules and some modules are high-quality effects like tape-echo and the distortion.). This is not even counting the freeware available for SCOPE made from SDK users of the userbase. SCOPE has probably lost more plugins than UAD has gained. There are hundreds of plugins on SCOPE.

It's also worth noteing that Apollo's routing is extremely limited and crippled in many ways so there is very limited use of its plugins in its dsp environment (such as only 2 stereo outputs from the DAW into the Apollo's REALtime-dsp-environment, so if you want to use Apollo's realtime effects on Native synths then you only get 2 stereo outputs from the DAW (or 4 mono outputs) to process them.}. When Apollo was first released UA cleverly got away with having no software outputs and thus one needed to do a adat loopback to process Native synths, etc with Apollo effects. The routing is very limited in Apollo, it has no multi-client drivers or multiple drivers, very high round-trip-latency for Native plugins due to Firewire protocol, and some of their new plugins are old SCOPE plugins (brainworx, SPL and softube ported their plugins to the uad platform), Apollo has no hardware MIDI I/O's.

Despite being very limited functionality wise Apollo and UAD cards hugely sell like hot-cakes because of several reasons:

1. UA makes really good vintage emulation effects and Emulation effects has been the flavor the market wants for quite awhile now. People want to sound like their favorite artist of old (Beattles, Pink Floyd, Micheal Jackson, etc) and favorite engineers and like each other and view UA as the best company or atleast a great option for this.

2. Marketing; Everytime UA releases something new they claim it's groundbreaking, revolutionary or something of that nature with hardware functionality and software releases even when it's obvious that is not true but they play-the-percentage-game knowing they'll fool enough people. They always claim accurate emulations when it comes to their plugins even though this has been proven false many times in the past. There is always big name famous Engineers and Artist advertising their products. There is always positive magazine reviews despite their platform having many flaws. There is always recommendations and advertisement for UA from retail stores.

3. The UAD appears to be a fast developing platform in a world where 'more equals better' in peoples eyes. Fast development adds excitement and allure, especially to gear addicts who like to collect plugins (but how fast developing can it truly be when it's actually playing catch-up to SCOPE? And conversely how can SCOPE truly be slow when it has more in every way?). Things aren't always what they appear to be.

UA are a VERY business smart company that's for sure, and were able to build up a good reputation and mighty empire from long ago when Native was extremely lacking in soundquality and processing power. Plus they started with a good reputation and credibility due to being manufacturers of some of the old hardware they were emulating with their plugins.


EDITED

[fraz]

Thanks for the very interesting reply-The emulation of plugins is their forte within a DSP environment-
So as far as the emulation of these plugins goes are they better in that respect to the Xite-1 plugins? or offer an angle that Scope plugins don't offer? - I will read your reply again (I'm not the author of this UAD vs Xite thing btw.... )....

The Nomad Factory do some good emulations for native systems.

I've not got far enough with all this yet to know just how good the scope plugins are in real use-I got Scope because of the mixing-synths-samplers-fx- the whole shebang.... .....I don't regret it but do regret not buying a word clock sync card for the PCI......

fwiw I really like the look of the UAD thing-They have an audio interface with plugs-something similar for laptops and also have a PCI-e card for plugs- but I wouldn't swap it for the Xite-1 or Scope PCI cards - no chance-

[garyb]

they're not better, but they are branded....

[endre70]

You had me the last time sounddesigner.. Now I actually want to buy scope plugs..

Thank you for another informative post!

[katano]

you definitely need a xite then, you won't come that far with a pulsar II and a luna

[endre70]

you definitely need a xite then, you won't come that far with a pulsar II and a luna

hahaha. You are probably right:) Will find out soon I hope!

[siriusbliss]

I kinda wish SC would develop an Apollo-sized Xite.... especially if multiple devices could be daisy-chained.

Anyways - your get WAY more bang-for-the-buck with Xite compared to UAD.

G

[Marco]

UAD? Am I stupid! What a question! Better burn your money, or buy my kitchen in spammers kitchensale. Live can be so rich. . .and xited

we are not zeuge jehova or another strange religion, we do not believe in xite, but we know it exists, it was born as creamware, died for a day, and raised a day later as sonic core. Amen

All believers have one in his PC, alive, not in heaven, its in the pc alive in realtime, i believe without latenz, and i feel like in heaven.

ATTENTION this WERBETEXT INFLUENCES YOUR THOUGHTS

[Sounddesigner]

You had me the last time sounddesigner.. Now I actually want to buy scope plugs..

Thank you for another informative post!

No problem! Good luck! And happy gear hunting!

[fraz]

Do Waves have all the plugins that UAD offer? - Looking at their site there are a lot of bundles etc.....

If they do have all that UAD offer they have or are about to release an audio interface amongst other gadgets.... .....that may supplement your Scope plugins should you buy them along with Xite-1 or - D - 1 is better- - From what I've read the Waves hardware will connect into an Ethernet port on a computer-and offer their plugins native or bound to their hardware that is network based-

Food for thought-

[endre70]

Thank you all for your feedback!

I am glad to announce that http://www.supermicro.com/products/moth ... 0SLA-F.cfm is working like a charm with my PulsarII & LunaII cards. No shared IRQ (on the two last physical PCI slots), and 12 master verbs before getting DSP overload on the 13th (with 3.6 ghz xeon quad core).

So I guess there will be another 5 years before considering a new setup.

Regards
Endre

[garyb]

that's great!
supermicro is really nice stuff.