wax&wires

Universal Audio Announces UAD-2 Solo/Laptop

I’ve been waiting for this one. Back when I had a G5 tower, it was no sweat to find DSP cards to offload the processing of really solid plug-ins onto a card instead of the host CPU. While there have been products that tried to so similar things on laptops through firewire units and such, nothing had been released that was easy to take around and had the effects we all wanted. I used to dream of a way to drop a UAD-1 in a housing to use it via firewire or something on my laptop, but never gave it enough thought or effort to see if anybody was doing it with success.

Universal Audio has now announced the UAD-2 SOLO/Laptop, and ExpressCard version of the UAD-2 SOLO DSP accelerator card. That means you get top of the line emulations of Neve, Roland, SPL, Moog, and other great analog products on your laptop; and all without taxing your processor! It supports VST, AU, and RTAS plugs on both Mac and PC platforms.

Expect to see it host UA’s 1176SE Compressor/Limiter, Pultec EQP-1A EQ, RealVerb Pro Room Modeler and the CS-1 Channel strip. You can also add plug-ins for an additional cost down the line.

It’s so small and portable, unlike the TC PowerCore, and you know you’re getting quality effects with UA.

We expect to see it on shelves this upcoming spring, coming in around $500.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 8:14 pm. It is filed under wires and tagged with dsp, hardware, namm, plugins, software, universal audio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.