UAD-1 Card Vs TC Electronics Powercore?

Thanks CJ! I don't always have time to scour the net so this really helps.

Hey Guys,

Just thought I`d join in the conversation here even though I haven`t read the whole thread. I have had a UAD card for sometime now and love what it does. The compressors are great. LA2A for smooth vocals is perfect. 1176 for a `harder` sound and is really nice for rock drums. The Pultec and Cambridge EQs are really nice, although for mastering, I really like the Voxengo Gliss EQ as well.

While most people agree that the Powercore reverbs may be more suited for general purposes, there are some instances where the Realverb and Dreamverb work very well.

I haven`t had a chance to use it on orchestral stuff, so I`m not sure what the benefit would be to be honest, but for song production I think the UAD is great.

Chris

Agreed. I'm really looking forward to seeing how both the UAD and the Powercore interact - sounds like the best of both worlds.

Can't quite seem to cut this thread loose. I really would like to move on to new territory but there is more story here. It's like a good thriller novel that keeps spinning out its tale of intrigue.

I spent a little more quality time with the nice folks at UAD regarding the combo of it and Powercore. They have been very courteous, forthcoming and prompt in all their responses to my questions.
(First let me say that they contend there is no problem with interfacing with G5's.)
I asked if there was any conflict in using a PCI Powercore in the same G5 as a UAD. They said that it would be OK. It's a lot less money to get Powercore Element - the PCI version that has the reverbs but not Master X3, Filtroid and Character- than to get the Powercore Compact firewire version with those new plugs. Surprisingly they (UAD) added the comment that if I had a firewire interface (and I do use the 002R) I would not want to get a firewire version of the Powercore.
I don't really know why or with what authority they might say that. I always thought that you could have several firewire devices on the same buss and not have any problems. Although I haven't really tested that myself because heretofore I've always been a SCSI and Fibre Channel hardware kind of guy.
Also apparently, the Powercore firewire versions only work on a FW400 buss - interesting info for G5 owners out there.
So now at this point, I plan to get a PCI Powercore Element and the UAD Studio Pak.
I'll save hundereds of dollars, hopefully won't have any PCI or firewire conflicts and have all the reverbs and vintage processing plugs that I will need for Pro Tools and Logic.

So, there we have it... until any more layers of intrigue are available.

Best regards,

Jack

That's good news. I've been a little concerned with PCI conflicts since I'm also running the Motu PCI424 audio card as well. In a perfect world this would work - unfortunately... which is why I've been extra cautious. Let me know how this works! I have a G5 as well, so some input would really help before I too make the plunge.

I've been doing a lot of reading on the UAD and Powercore cards lately.

It seems that a lot of users (UAD more specifically) are turning off firewire to free up the PCI bus. This does seem to be more for guys running 3 or 4 cards in one machine though.

Another trick is to turn off old com ports, printer ports etc if your motherboard has them and your not using them.

This has been spefically to address the issue of pops and crackles on the card. There is also a program called; ltcycfg.exe for tweaking PCI latencies.

Oh, and some guys are turning off busmastering on their video cards.

Dont know if this helps anyone specifically, but depending on your system and its requirements, a firewire card may not neccassarily be smooth sailing as it may hog the PCI buss. (Only going by what I read though!)

Interesting! Thank you for this, Scott.

I wonder what two powercore compacts (firewire) would do in one machine :?:

According to TC Electronic:

"Hook up to 4 PowerCore Compact?s into the same system via the FireWire connectors, combine it with the PowerCore FireWire for even more power, or hook it up to a system already running with PowerCore Element installed. For maximum flexibility we designed the PowerCore Compact to be highly portable. All you need to get your production environment on the move is a PowerCore Compact, a laptop and a plane ticket! "

4 PowerCore Compacts in one system? Wow.

M M

Using an uad1 together with a powercore pci here. Its a bit of an aged DAW (p4 1.8ghz, Gigabyte 8IRXP mobo, 1gig DDR 2100 ram).
I did disable everything in the BIOS that I don't need (com ports, lpt ports, usb2, floppy disk controller, promise raid controller).
Then assigned some IRQs to the pci slots (after I had win2k installed in standardPC mode), so ultimately there are no IRQ conflicts, everything works *really* spiffy even though the machine is rather weak in terms of cpu (also the normal IDE controllers are ata100, not 133 yet, so the installed HDs aren't operating at peak performance even).
Soundcard is rme hdsp w/ digiface. Works fine at 1.5 and 3ms latency, but then the cpu gets eaten by VSTi synths which I use plenty of, so I'm using 6ms whenever I need to load the CPU up to bursting with VSTis and effects.
The DSP cards work nicely in this setup (they have their own IRQ like everything else does).

What should be considered is that theres problems with dual opteron mainboards (MSI and Tyan in particular, the prior has trouble with powercore, the latter with UAD, resulting in huge cpu use even though the plugins are dsp based.. see DAW forum for reference).

Markus

Thanks for that MarkusH - I've heard of problems with the opteron mainboards (thanks for the heads up regarding MSI & Tyan) - if its hitting the CPU what's the point? Because not hitting the CPU is the idea, or am I missing something.