Universal Audio Uad-2 Powered Plug-ins Full Crack REPACKed
Annice Hemmerling
There have been several times in recent years when the release of certain software plug-In's have generated wild claims of no longer needing to own and maintain analogue audio outboard gear or continue to work OTB (outside of the box) many times this has been part of the marketing hype to try and peak interest in a highly saturated marketplace.
I'm sure I don't need to name brand names who have become rather well know for both marketing hype and or generating widely held opinion of the top spot's when it comes to the sound quality and realism of an emulated or modelled piece of vintage analogue outboard hardware so I'll leave that to your own thoughts and opinions.
However over the last 10 years or so one particular brand has quietly, but tirelessly been working away in the shadows, pioneered its own proprietary technology and been yielding rather outstanding sonic results while still remaining largely a secret or at least semi-unheard of to the wider audio engineering community. I myself have been following and using their products on and off for several years now, I've watched and experienced them slowly mature into what I now truly believe is about to explode into a domineering force in the audio Plug-in world - The brands name is Acustica Audio.
Back when I first discovered Acustica and Nebula for myself I was mainly a Cubase user on Windows XP, which was perhaps "just as well" considering Nebula was both a VST and Windows only Plug-In. At the time the industry (and at least the circles I was immersed in building Pro Audio PC's) was deep into the grip of the software sampler revolution with Nemesys (later Tascam) Gigastudio and Native Instruments Kontakt leading the way. Stanalone server machines were being built in huge numbers to fulfill the demands by composers wishing to run full orchestras of huge sample libraries never before possible. We thought at the time PC power was really coming of age and yet the resource demands of these libraries was so high that we found ourselves producing such dedicated computers just to handle the hosting and streaming of these instruments leaving the master sequencing computers enough breathing space for the recording and playback of the MIDI data compositions.
So at this time everything was about sample libraries and virtual instruments......and sample driven virtual instruments ? We were also in the midst of a "Reverb Revolution", Convolution Reverbs based on impulse responses had hit the market and were a very popular way to capture a real room space or a preset from a hardware algorithmic effects unit and then import it into a specially designed host plug-in encompassing some clever filtering and manipulation it was possible to use it almost exactly as the original source captured, it was quite remarkable at the time but very CPU hungry, especially at lower latencies. There were plenty of brands producing algorithmic audio effects plugins but we were not quite so overwhelmed with the current trend in new software recreations of must have classic hardware in same way we are today, for me it has pretty much reached a point where I can barely handle it anymore and am losing interest in yet another Neve, SSL, Pultec or Fairchild derivative each sounding questionably slightly better than the last but i supposed that's just progress.
Anyway .....Nebula! On first observation it appeared to be a sampler or sorts, at least in the fact that the audio wizards at Acustica had come up with a way of sampling real hardware Pre-Amps, EQ's, Compressors, Tape machines, Reverbs delays and other modulation effects in a totally intriguing way, one plug-in with multiple uses, One plug-in to rule them all ?
Nebula came with a factory library which in itself was rather impressive and a great example of what was possible, early 3rd party collaborators began to produce some rather impressive add-on libraries throught the use of Acustica's N.A.T. Sampler and best of all they sounded phenomenal ! Reverbs sounded ultra real and dynamic - in fact everything did, tape machines, entire consoles (long before any other Virtual Console plug-in had come along) there was some serious potential here but there were a couple of snags which I'll explain below.
In the most simplistic way I can articulate Acustica use their own in house developed sampling tool N.A.T. sampler to capture the subject hardware just like a convolution impulse response creation, except its done many, many times with varying signal and transient levels passing through which allows the capture of "dynamic layers" (think of it like multi velocity drum samples) as well as the possibility of more complex parameter adjustments that were not quite so possible with the static and non-dynamic impulse response methods. This results in a huge collection of various files which are then arranged together in a library that the Plug-in can call upon, when you move a knob on the GUI the sample is switched to the appropriate capture and the signal is passed though that sample but this switching is also dependent on the level of the incoming signal thus making is dynamic. well at least that's how I understand it to work but will gladly be corrected by anyone else with a deeper understanding and articulation for a better explanation.
There is far more complexity to this but hopefully that gives you some basic idea of what is going on, It also explains why some of the plug-ins and libraries are rather large due to the size of the sampled library number or dynamic layers and parameter variations.
One very important factor to be aware of in order to get the very best from the Acustica products is the understanding and implementation of correct gain staging, failure to pay special attention to this will result in experiencing undesirable or unintended results.
LearnDigitalAudioTV created a video training series for Nebula that is well worth watching and this free excerpt explains the background to the required gain staging, I suggest you take the full course if you want to know as much as possible and of course read all of the relevant product manuals and documentation.
As I mentioned above there were some drawbacks to this whole Nebula experience in the early days which was also a shortfall for many other plug-in brands. As software developers began to realise the possibilities open to them with the rapidly increasing processing power unleashed by Intel processors and no sooner had the users thought processing power had come of age suddenly being able to run a stock EQ and Compressor on every channel of our DAW plus a few carefully selected mix effects as "fairy dust" We saw those resources begin to get gobbled up again by more complex plug-in designs sapping more and more CPU cycles than we had previously been used to. Running Nebula in multiple instances seemed to throw all those ideas of processing power liberation to the wall ! This was one CPU hungry little firecracker and it was pretty tough to run as many instances as we might have wanted or become accustomed to from some of the older plug-ins. We were "going to need a bigger boat" ! Dual CPU Multi-threaded Xeon powered RAM packed monsters were our thing back then but they were very expensive and so limited to who could afford them!
As with most high CPU demanding software applications in the audio world one of the major adverse effects of CPU load is the decreased ability to operate at low latencies, this becomes a problem when wanting to record and monitor though plug-ins or achieve playback of a heavy session to mix without audio artifacts such as pops and clicks or worse still total audio engine dropouts. This wasn't quite turning out to be the utopia we had hoped for and the DSP powered alternative of the time such as Digidesign/Avid Pro Tools HD TDM, TC Electronic Powercore and Universal Audio UAD were also winning a lot of favor by releasing CPU cycles and hosting their plug-in on their own dedicated DSP chips but sill with the latter two examples latency continued to be something of an issue.
"Hand in hand" with the two other issues mentioned above this one sealed the deal for many people, For some when the performance of a system was being "stretched to the max" a crash at just the wrong time is incredibly frustrating and after a while becomes too much disappointment to continue to endure. The benefits in other worldly sound quality did not outweigh the risk of random crashing or audio artefacts to which early versions of Nebula seemed to be plagued with in my own experience. In some instances it was difficult to run just one Nebula insert and eventually I gave up trying to incorporate it into my work on a regular basis, but I knew the potential was there and sooner or later things would improve, and they did. I continued to upgrade to newer versions as they were released, Nebula Server was a new exciting addition which meant you could run a standalone network linked server PC to power Nebula instances in your DAW but I never really got that into my studio templates and didn't want to have to invest and maintain a dedicated second PC for the task at the time. It was the same story when years later I got Vienna Ensemble Pro, the idea was nice but I never really got into the whole workflow.
As my interest in Nebula dwindled a little I was also more and more running Pro Tools as my main DAW of choice and trying to run Nebula through a VST wrapper in Pro Tools was an absolute "crashy unstable nightmare" so I shelved the idea and waited it out still thinking one day things might get better.
I cant remember when I first noticed Acquavox, maybe it was an Acustica marketing email or a KVR forum thread but it really looked good and was a new twist for Acustica, a single plug-in based on the Nebula engine with dedicated functionality, It made perfect sense to do for a few reasons, firstly the GUI and number of parameters for Nebula (although had improved greatly thanks to some awesome 3rd party skins - yeah it was skin-able, cool huh !) was a little complicated if all you wanted was a no nonsense two knob classic compressor, even if in reality it wasn't all that complicated it looked it, so came across as a little daunting.
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