UAD?What are your thoughts with Native vs Satellite plugins?

One thing with the DSP, there were a lot of guys who had been staff at major studios in almost every market who primarily still tracked in for hire rooms and mixed and did some overdubs at home who went UAD for the low latency. Combined with the quality there really wasn’t another ecosystem that competed at the price point. Now all these guys that I know have a particular UAD plugin that they prefer from another vendor, but if they want to track with an API EQ or 1176 emulation it’s the UAD. If DSP goes bye-bye, I doubt these guys would have any allegiance long term.

Because until Spark they haven’t been this far down market and I doubt they have anyone in management who has worked at this far down market. You have customers with the same issues you always had, but now you are also supporting a new to you platform to all kinds of new customers with less technical background and your also going to find your new customers are going to be running your new stuff on all kinds of crap computers. So rather than a linear increase in support you have x times x times x times x. Unless someone who is in charge has been through a move like this you’re not going to see it that way. Then you have to find and train the labor, plus your clients are going to be using rigs nobody in house has ever heard of. Unless you have lived it you don’t see it. Anyone remember PT’s first 2 attempts at down market? Session 8? Then more similar to this the purchase of M-Audio? How did those work out?

A two week wait time, though completely unacceptable all on its own, could possibly be forgiven if it were ultimately shown to be only temporary, and depending on how long this lasts. Though I still think UA should have done a better job of anticipating this. The plan for Spark (and other new product lines) was in development for some not insignificant amount of time prior to its release, so that should have given UA ample opportunity to have the additional CS resources in place at release, rather than the mess we have now.

Regardless, what will continue to be unacceptable and what is definitely not temporary was, first, a reduction in the available phone hours to only a few hours a day and only on three days a week to, second, removal of phones altogether. That happened some time ago, well before this recent increase in wait times to two weeks.

Now all we have is this shitty ticket system with a minimum wait time (by design) of three days, and that is best case scenario (it's obviously much longer right now). Also, that's a three day minimum just to get an initial response, which is often just a canned response with no real thought behind it. Then you get to go thru multiple rounds of this before you finally maybe get to an answer that actually addresses the situation. So it takes a week or more of this type of start/stop conversation on top of however long it took you to get the initial response. And this is ALL very much intentional and by design.

As Drew is fond of saying, (I paraphrase) a person should make purchases based on what you need now and what products offer those features now, not what features you hope may one day be added to a product. Well that's a two way street then. If I should purchase without expecting any new features to be added in the future, I similarly should purchase without expecting any current features to be removed in the future.

Well, when I purchased my Apollos, I could pick up a phone and get someone right away, or at least get a call back that same day. It's part of what I paid for. It was the "now" at that point in time, and definitely played a roll in my decision to purchase, same as the quality of customer service, or lack there of, plays a roll in the purchasing decisions of many people.

So this down grade in customer service feels like features that I paid for are actually being taken away. I don't know that I would have made the same purchasing decision knowing what I know now about what would become of UA's customer service.

My update is, though it did take almost 2 weeks to solve, both Drew and UA support did respond to me and help fix my issue in the end which I appreciate, as well as the communication above saying growth has overwhelmed support that they are working on solving and improving. I'll take them at their word since they did follow through with thanks to Drew/UA for their help.

Izotope on the other hand now that they've been absorbed by NI, seems to no longer have any support at all, and no way to directly contact support. Only FAQ help links. Even when NI responds within a couple of days to some questions, they ignore the question of how do I contact Izotope support, which makes me Leary of purchasing any more Izotope products until they once again have support contact.