so I’m not versed on the live application as I do all my work in the box at home.
that being said, I purchased a UAD octo satellite a few months back with various UAD plugs.
here’s why UAD kicks ass, their plugins are very very accurate emulations of outboard gear.
pieces of hardware that might cost thousands, or 10s of thousands if we are talking about an original fairchild, will only cost hundreds with UAD. now yes its still hundreds of dollars BUT you get the hardware sounds and the associated harmonics INSIDE your computer. so you will pay more for sure, but significantly less than if you wanted to get the same sounds in hardware.
specifically with your question of UAD and Apollo Interfaces, you go Apollo for a few reasons. You can have your vocals feed into the plugins in REALTIME via the mic. So as opposed to having a plugin added after the fact and with some latency between the mic and the plugin working, “Unison Enabled” UAD plugs allow for basically zero latency.
The other thing is that Apollo’s have processors on them that do the work of the apollo plugins on the Apollo as opposed to your computer processor. This is whats called DSP (Digital Signal Processing). So once you are in the UAD world, and own a bunch of their plugs, having more DSP allows you to run more of their plugins at once. And you can run out of DSP pretty quick.
So basically, if you are thinking about getting the apollo and getting into the UAD world, and if you have the $$$$, you WONT regret it. Get the Apollo QUAD if you are going to get one. No point in having only ONE or TWO cores on that thing if its the only UAD device, trust me on that.
So since I don’t have an audio interface and I’m wanting to gear up for live performance and studio tracking, would uad be good choice for quality of interface in synergy with a mic? Cause audio interface effects sound quality of tracking right?
The dsp factor you think will be obsolete in event of computer upgrades and recent advances in core processing power?