UA Pricing in the future

They could be simply buying market share.

I don’t think so.  I’m guessing that whatever they’re making on the sales is projected to be more profitable than what they were making at previous prices selling to DSP owners (they already got…$150? from me this year that they hadn’t been picking up previously).  

For their sake I hope so because, as you said, you can’t really put that genie back in the bottle.  There are too many alternatives to sell someone a 1176 plug for $100 when they have a reasonable expectation that it will hit $30 once or twice a year.

They’re no longer top of the line like they were in 2010. U-he, TDR, Goodhertz, and PSP put out products with serious vibe that aren’t inferior ersatz of old analog gear.

Or even if they are… that PSP Binamp is dope and I got it for 19 dollars. Take that 200 dollar DSP plugs.

It’s always kind of funny to me that we aren’t seeing UA try and keep making their current roster of plugs even better as the years move on.
I bought the axefx from one of our esteemed members here about a month and a half ago and there have already been 3 firmware updates and multiple betas. Cliff designed this thing and constantly works to improve the sonics. I’ve had three of these things (I know, shocker) and it’s been this way every time I’ve had it.
So - all that to say - UA should be doing this too.

To add - IMO, the modeling that Cliff does with this thing seems much closer to the actual hardware than plugins do. I mean - if I wasn’t lazy, I’d see how these compare with my main plugs.

The dilemma is that UA offers very little new to the established client, after you have your interface and the plugs you want, what are you going to buy from UA: not much,

So, UA switched focus over the last while and is putting lots of effort into launching new products so not much focused on the old school pro users, but new users to hook them up to the lets build revenue stream.

I sold my ua stuff for the second time a year or so ago because of the inequitable way it was treating old clients vs new in terms of plug pricing. At the time, I said at ua forum, for ua to be equitable, it should just give licenses to those of us who had already paid more for fewer licences, than the new users who had only paid for a subscription for a few months and then were able to buy Ultimate for less than $ 1000.

Let's just say that idea was not supported

I returned to the UA forum recently due to buying the Signature bundle: all its plugs that now run natively. I noticed Drew has started a thread about exploring how UA could better serve its establish cliental. He was looking for volunteers. I responded, radio silence.

I expect plug prices to stay low, UA to put some, not all major new plugs into the subscription plan and for more uad2 to be ported over to UADx.

Dan, we were making so much progress .... bonding over our hate of Sennheiser monitors!


And then ....  



You have to go and be mean to me 

The Dangerous Compressor, Elysia, Daking, and all of the crazy stuff that uses analog multipliers to construct discrete vcas. Nobody wants to make anything new not that many of their would be purchasers even know how to use an LA2A or DBX 160.

Agreed. They can be much harder to get a transparent, useful control out of than the auto peak-crest detectors because their ability to control the volume of the signal (whether using the various LAs or something like a DBX 160) is correlated to the user's skill at getting the signal level to the areas of gain reduction where the compressor is most program dependent, where the peaks make it speed up or slow down with the signal depending on the settings of the compressor. This same holds true for many other pure peak or RMS compressors on the auto settings where they should probably usually be used when controlling the signal like the SSL Bus comp or Daking compressors.

More modern design compressors either calculate peak crest for you regardless of level (the Drawmer auto compressors, Weiss DS-1, Dangerous Compressor's Smart Dynamics, U-he Presswerk). Others let you control the secondary peak-crest threshold yourself for greater control (Aphex Compellor, GML 8900, Crane Song STC-8, Kotelnikov, MDWDRC2). The first have a lot of knobs but are hard to make sound bad. The second are hard for new users to learn until you learn to use one. All the producers have the free version of Kotelnikov but hardly any of them know how to use it.

back to the OT... I think UA finally.... or maybe UA customers finally realized that many of their plugins were available for $29 from PA (the BX stuff) or equivalents from other places that compete head to head.  UA has to compete with that (and Waves and more...)  I bought a lot of UAD plugins (all from sales) for my Apollo 16 and then got a lot of Native plugins when they came out, which I was glad to see.  This year I bought $0 for black friday/holiday sales.  Partly because I really didn't need any more (and BX and Softtube and others had the same stuff cheaper), but I'm also ticked off because after 10.2.0 they broke all the firewire drivers.  Supposedly they still support it for Windows (and older Mac versions) but it seems they cut it out for everything even though they won't admit it.  UA support told me that 11.0.1 fixed it, so I spent 2 hours loading up the new version, found out it did the same shit, uninstalled and re-installed 10.2.0 (the last version I can get to work) and then deleted all the plugins I don't have (although I tried UADmate this time which works pretty well) .  They have definitely taken their focus off DSP to work on Spark/Native. What they really want is to sign you up for a Spark subscription.  The oh so lucrative world of recurring revenues!  I find myself looking at other interfaces these days... (I still have a Quad PCIe card and I don't use the console plugins that often anymore).  

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Oh Drew I’m going to bet your lurking on this thread, if you’re not well you’re not doing your job. What you really need to do is convince those in charge to unofficially, unannounced, is grant those who buy into this deal a lic. Tag allows them to use the DSP versions as well.
Let me explain, you want the market share, but your pushing this direct, so your dealers that have only seen the DSP sales a reason to push UA. If they understand that unofficially the deal will include DSP they can sell the DSP knowing the customer can run both. The dealer gets a piece and you get a piece. Plus if the dealer is pushing the. DSP for you, UA gets the customer in the eco system and gets the long term value added sales.


If the bosses see the vision just give me a lic. For everything UAD cause they would pay a small fortune to a consultant what is a simple duh.

I think this topic was quite surgically examined some weeks ago in another thread here if I remember correctly. Ive seen this lately across many forums, whenever the dsp vs native and “there is no place dsp anymore” is debated, the comments usually reveal that the majority of uad dsp users discussing the topic never used the dsp for the sake of dsp, only to be able to run uad plugs. Very often maybe not fully understanding the benefit of dsp and how the fundaments of UA ecosystem is built on that way beyond the idea of dsp vs native in plug usage. The whole why buy a computer to run plugs when I have a computer is rather irrelevant. That is not really what dsp is there for. A growing number of plug buyers today i believe do not record live audio, which obviously speaks for a growing market of native plugs and that is for sure dominating the plug industry. So it makes sense for UA to get a cut of that. In a recording environment native really is not a substitute, if you are relying on the benefits of dsp workflow.

So I wouldn’t be surprised if there would be a stable dsp usage in the future too, despite the natives will for sure eat up a significant part of that crowd who only used dsp for the sake of plugs. The native will bring a bunch of new users though that might cover that void economically.