For the home-recording folks - Blowout sale on UAD-1 cards

[chromium]

Just an fyi for those who may be interested- UAD-1e audio processing cards are on sale at a number of places for USD $99.  I got one from Sam Ash w/ free 2-day fedex, plus a $100 voucher towards an additional plugin:

http://www.samash.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/product_UAD1e%20Express%20PAK_-1_10052_10002_-49971184

These are PCIe (PCI Express) cards for your computer, and they will allow you to run signal processing plugins on your DAW without taxing its CPU(s).  Everyone that I know with these raves about them for mixing - apparently the Pultec EQ, and UREI and UA compressor/limiter plugins are very good.  There's a list of the available plugins here:

http://www.uaudio.com/products/software/index.html

If you want a lot of the extras, you might be better served by watching Ebay for someone selling off a used card + plugins.  Looks like a lot of folks are doing this to raise funds for the new version of this card (~$1500).  I'm mostly interested in the mixing plugs, so this $99 special was a great deal for me.

[OldManC]

Are these compatible with older PCI cards? The blurb at Sam Ash mentions the newer PCI express cards, so if it only works with those I'm out of luck...

Ok, I got my answer here:

http://www.uaudio.com/support/uad/g5.html

Anyone interested may want to check.

[chromium]

Good point to clarify.

I haven't seen any of the PCI cards in this deal - just the PCIe (PCI Express) version.  Make sure your computer has a vacant PCIe slot before ordering.  They're the little card slots in this pic:




I've also been seeing complaints in some forums about these UAD-1 cards not working in the 8-core Mac Pros.  If you have a Mac Pro, however, you probably don't need additional hardware acceleration for your plug-ins 

My Wintel system is about three years old, and its just one of the Fry's Outpost deals - so it was probably about a year old technology to start with.  So those of you with Wintel boxes - if your computer is newer than about five years old, there's a chance it has PCI Express slots.  If you have a dual-core Power Mac G5 from this side of 2005/2006, those should also have the PCIe slots.