UA’s HIC Discounts, Danexit and counseling

Well, since he deleted his profile, he now can’t unless he joins as a different name.

Haha.  I see that!


HIC = ?

Ah, right.  I had already forgotten what the exact original title even was.

Simply put, UAD has always had a pretty deaf ear when it comes to client relations. So this is nothing new. Kcat and I were writing them almost a decade ago about something they were doing that was distasteful.

Hundreds, maybe thousands of customers have asked UAD to implement some kind of plug-in list making it easier to find the plug-ins you have for ten years now. They still leave you to scroll through all their plugs to find what you're looking for. Yes, there are workarounds, but my point is, even something as simple as this was blown off by UAD for some convoluted corporate reasoning. So it doesn't surprise me when they refuse t find a middle ground to keep long term customers happy.

In many businesses, word of mouth is extremely important. I believe that one positive remark can reach 250 people on average. UAD's "customer service" taking two weeks to respond to an important technical problem is one more example of a good way to undermine the reputation that took decades to build.

This reminds me of the issues Gibson had when expanding too rapidly. There CEO eventually sold his share and left.

Yup, my fav so far.After all Apollos and symphony mkii.

All roads lead to UA!

Constructive criticism is fine, let's avoid a pile on though please. I talked to Dan over Skype a lot, IMO he is genuinely an interesting and cool person even if we didn't agree on everything but that's the core of learning. I'd like him to further contribute in time, so let's be supportive yeah?

I think we all appreciated Dan, but sometimes, he was just little too Dan!

I don't believe for a second this was avoided by UA for any convoluted reason.  I believe it is there 100% on purpose.  If you accidentally forget that you don't own that plugin and try it (well, maybe you end up liking it), or worse, you use it, and then come back to your session and it's expired and now you are forced to buy it?  It's purely a sales/marketing move.  It's free advertising right inside your DAW. 

I never thought of Dan as trying to insult people here. He called out a lot of objective flaws in products. Corrected untruths. Gave us in-depth analysis rooted in provable facts that no one else did. Sometimes I was puzzled at his tastes like when he told me modern Iron Maiden albums sounded better than the classics or that the O2 headphone amp was terrible(he never did answer my question as to why he felt that way as far as I can recall). But I just chalked it up to him being a bit eccentric. I've always wanted to hear his work. Perhaps it wouldn't suit my taste at all. After all, I've never embraced the way the TDR stuff sounded. Never got into Fuse either. Don't get me wrong. They're both very good companies, but I just never fell in love with them. With what he said about the Softube stuff recently and some of their design choices it made sense as to why I didn't like the sound of their non-FX plugins when used certain ways. His info about Satin and the SP2016 got me using them again when I had put them aside for a long time.

This recent stuff here, I was kinda waiting for him to give us the big narrative as it seemed he was connecting some dots. One point he seemed to be making was that modern hardware sounds more transparent and perhaps isn't worth having because of that. I'm not sure. The high-end stuff I've heard and/or worked with sounded classy. It could be clear, but also full and have some vibe to it. Still a big difference between plugin emulations and hardware versions of a Shadow Hills, VSM, or a Stamchild. Didn't he not care that much for the Weiss stuff a while back? I seem to remember him commenting about it over the years but now he's acquired it and thinks it's top notch. He always kinda digging, seeking out some kinda broader answers. It was always interesting to see where he went. Admittedly, I would kinda tune out some of the most eccentric stuff he said and just focus on things he wrote that were clear cut evidence of an objective problem. That's what I like to do, try and take real data and facts and then sorta follow my own path with it. At the end of the day, that's all we can really do. We don't need to try and be like anyone or strive to emulate certain subjective standards and styles. Adhering to objective principles like dithering is completely different though. Dan was big on that kinda stuff.

The thing that probably rubs people the wrong way about him is the absolutist way he talks at times. "this thing suck", "this thing is terrible", he doesn't use a lot of tact at times. When he'd say that about something I used, I'd often wonder what he found that would lead him to that conclusion. He left GS a while ago, I think. Hopefully he comes back here as I don't know that he'd pop up on KVR or VI-Control. Probably not on Audio Science Review either. I'm sure his writeups on here took hours to do at times, he certainly put the effort in. Too bad he deleted his profile, he probably had more lurker fans than he knew and some of us will want to go back and read things he posted. My guess is that he wants to avoid the temptation to come back and spend hours a week on here. I don't think he hates everyone here enough to screw us out of reading his work. Too bad he doesn't have a website or anything, at least not one that I know of. There was a lot of useful knowledge that deserves to be preserved.

I've definitely referenced more than one of Dan's posts and making decisions on purchases.