Not 8 hours after putting the credit card away for another UAD-1 plug-in (20% off compressors, $25 voucher), they hit us with another one, this time for equalisers. And here was I thinking that my DAW was safe from Neve for the time being.

Bankrupcy, here I come...

You mean you didn't KNOW that was coming?

Come on, October dynamics madness, roll up, roll, up, don't miss it, it'll all be over by Halloween...

Even I spotted a November EQ deal coming up.

It's still about £100 to get eg. the 1081 though, seems small but you can't make too many of those kind of purchases before you really are bankrupt.

Yeah, I know, but I have very little self control.

Give me a shiny-sounding acoustic guitar track and I'm anybody's.

While it's enormously tempting to "spend" your vouchers, I've managed to withhold the last couple of offers (dynamics ones, moving madness ones etc) and let them expire.

I feel good that I wasn't peer-pressured into buying more plugs

I'm actually a little suspicous of all the offers lately. A nice freebie once in a while is nice, but they seem to be giving offer after offer month after month. While I hugely respect UA as a company, I can't help think that there's marketing reasons for encouraging people to buy as many plugins as possible now.

Maybe they really are *finally* moving over to a whole new DSP platform next year..?

I think the offers kight well be economies of scale. That is this last 18 months they have gone from nice but fairly esoteric, in terms of user base, to de rigeur for the budding producer/engineer working mainly ITB.

Look at it another way, the more plugins you have, the more cards you are liable to purchase.

You also might point to waves paranoia, wherebye, a rake load of semi pro and pro people, since waves have come over all mafia style, have dumped their waves products and jumped on the UAD bandwagon.

At this moment in time UAD pretty much have the field to themslves, in terms of, offering flavours from across the board. The SSL offering offer SSL, and that is it. Powercore seem to be lagging behind on all this.

Overall, i would supect that, UAD want as many people to get the UAD habit before they launch a new DSP card that can run say 4-5 x the plugins the present ones can.

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nibbled to death by an Okapi http://www.soundclick.com/tubilahdog

It's not just plug-ins. The cards were being 'given away' as part of a promotion with the Sonar 7 upgrade. Only in the US though which was very galling.

It did look suspicious - either cash flow problems or clearing the decks for a new DSP platform

J

Since when does good marketing automatically become suspicious?

The costs of development for these plugs have all been paid; it doesn't cost the company anything to sell 100 more than they would have done; therefore they can sell them for any amount they want - it's all money in the bank for UA.

At the end of the day (and earlier joking aside) I wouldn't buy the plug-ins if I didn't feel they improved my recordings. The discounts and vouchers just push me in that direction a little earlier!

Onethng that does strike me, and no-one seems to have thought of this, is that. They might be planning on releasing a new DSP card that comes with a *Virtual Desk*.

Imagine being able to buy from UAD a card which has say a 24 channel neve desk with a choice of a couple of Compressors on each channel and say 4 auxiliarlies with a reverb on each and maybe 4-6 stereo/mono subgroups?

I see several people are already. in effect, doing this sort of thing, but i wuld be happy to buy a card that pulled all this together using on DSP with a seperate graphic interface in the form of a *desk*..Im' sure it would look well nice on a LCD 24 inch widescreen set up at a viewing angle, more like the rake of a traditional desk...

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nibbled to death by an Okapi http://www.soundclick.com/tubilahdog

It just seems to be a change in approach to the market that is "suspicious". These offers look very like an end of line sell off which is very common in the music hardware business. It's amazing how (for example) the price of mackie 824 and 624 monitors fell just before the release of the MkII versions.

UA stuff is high quality and is now (even?) better value than it used to be. A debate about whether it is 'good' marketing is interesting but probably futile as we don't know what is currently driving the marketing bods at UA (maximise revenue, drive market share, maintain premium pricing , sell off stock etc. etc.).

There is an expectation that UA will release a new hardware platform soon (whatever soon means) and lots of folk will be hoping theat these offers are the precursor to that. Maybe just wishful thinking.

If something like this was going to happen, I would expect that after a big range of software offers, which we currently seem to be in, that we then start having deals, offers and bonuses on the cards themselves.

UA certainly aren't going to be wanting to launch a new DSP unit until they've got rid of their existing inventory of UAD-1's, because they are going to be worth very little on the release of a new platform.

Maybe they just have to pay for their fancy new building? It is quite large looking.

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David

Quote Setter:

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There is an expectation that UA will release a new hardware platform soon (whatever soon means) and lots of folk will be hoping theat these offers are the precursor to that. Maybe just wishful thinking.

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UA will be seriously toast if existing software authorisations don't run on any new platform!

I could understand them loss-leading with the cards, but not with the software.

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Dynamite with a laser beam...