VST, AU, and RTAS formats are all supported by the UAD, and my primary DAWs for testing were Logic 9 (Tape Op #74), Ableton Live 8.1 (#72), and Pro Tools LE 7.4 and 8 (#72).
I opted for the laptop card for a degree of portability, and I was also curious to see what kind of mixes I could build on my rapidly aging Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro (running 10.6). The UAD plug-ins all run with UA's PCIe accelerator cards (which are available in scaled processor strengths) or with a neat ExpressCard-based laptop solution. This has to be one of the more challenging tasks given to me from the Tape Op High Command, simply because it's hard to pick just a few -they're all pretty awesome! So a while back, Andy asked me to pick a few favorites from the latest batch of Universal Audio's Powered Plug-In platform. I also asked senior contributor Dana Gumbiner, who recently added a UAD-2 SOLO/Laptop to his toolbox, to give us his comments. Now that Neil has a UAD-2 DUO, I asked him to tell us which plug-ins he's currently relying on. JB and LC wrote reviews of the PCIe and laptop versions of the UAD-2 in previous issues (Tape Op #67, #73), and a couple years ago, Tape Op contributor Neil Mclellan and I wrote about our favorite plug-ins for the UAD-1 platform (#63). As you've read in these pages, the UAD platform is popular with the Tape Op staff.
But one product that I did make sure to install was my UAD-2 QUAD DSP Accelerator Card along with all of its plug-ins. That meant I could pull out some PCIe cards, keep some USB and FireWire devices unplugged, and forgo much of the hassle (and cost) of upgrading everything for Win7 64-bit compatibility. Similarly, I didn't bother adding any plug-ins or accessories that I didn't find essential to my own projects. When I recently wiped the system disk of my primary music computer to replace Windows XP Pro with Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, I installed only the applications that I knew I'd be using regularly.
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