Universal Audio’s vast plug‑in range majors on licensed emulations of hardware products. Many of these represent partnerships with other manufacturers, but UA maintain their own manufacturing workshop where they continue to produce high‑end analogue equipment, and their latest channel strip plug‑in mashes up two of their own designs. The hardware 6176 combines the 610 valve mic preamp and the 1176 FET compressor, while the LA‑610 pairs the same preamp with the LA‑2A optical compressor. The LA‑6176 plug‑in emulates both, though not at the same time!
LA‑6176 is available both for the UAD‑2 platform and as a native plug‑in. Installation and authorisation are now handled by the convenient UA Connect utility but, at the time of writing, the UAD collection can only be updated en bloc, so if you have an Apollo or a Satelliite, you’re still faced with a 10GB+ download in order to get any new plug‑in. Hopefully that will change soon.
If you load it within Console or LUNA, it can take advantage of the preamp emulation features of Apollo hardware.
The UAD version of LA‑6176 is Unison‑enabled, so if you load it within Console or LUNA, it can take advantage of the preamp emulation features of Apollo hardware. And this is a plug‑in where that definitely makes sense, as the 610 preamp has a strong sonic character. It’s easily driven into mild or obvious saturation, with a distinctively thick, rich tone that’s perfect for warming up practically any source. Gentle high‑ and low‑shelving EQ bands allow this tone to be shaped further, and there’s also a 75Hz high‑pass filter and polarity inversion switch.
This colourful preamp is teamed up with a choice of two equally characterful compressors, neither of which should need any introduction to SOS readers. The 1176 is a fixed‑threshold FET compressor that’s capable of extremely fast attack and release times, and the implementation here is pleasingly full, allowing you to virtually press all the ratio buttons at once. UA have also added a wet/dry mix control that’s not present on the hardware. The LA‑2A, meanwhile, is an optical compressor with a valve make‑up gain stage, which is famous for its smoothness and subtle coloration. There’s no wet/dry control in this case, but I can’t think that it would really ever be needed with an LA‑2A anyway. The EQ and compressor stages can be independently bypassed.
Sonics
In use, the LA‑6176 plug‑in sounds just like you’d expect it to, and I mean that very much as a compliment! These are all classic circuits that we know and love, and the plug‑in emulations behave exactly as you’d hope. There are those who like to use both an 1176 and an LA‑2A in series on vocals, and you’d need to load two instances of the plug‑in to do that; you’ll also need to look elsewhere in the UA collection if you want to get anal about different iterations of the compressor designs, or tweak things under the hood. But that’s not really the point of the LA‑6176 plug‑in. The aim is to provide an input channel that’s dead simple to use and sounds great right off the bat, and that’s exactly what this does.