Reply To: Choosing Gear to improve my Mixing

[Simon BrownParticipant]

Hi Michael,

As I mentioned in my other reply to you, the Apollo can help reduce the load on your system, but it will [b]only[/b] run plugins which have been designed for it, which will very likely rule out all of the VSTs you currently own. The Universal Audio plugins are very good, but if you're expecting to buy an Apollo and to have it help with the plugins you use right now, it won't.

What I would say, now that I've seen your setup, is that as you already have a big Focusrite audio interface, buying another audio interface might not be the best idea and if you wanted to add some DSP power to your rig, getting an UAD DSP Accelerator card might be a better plan. Then you (maybe) don't need the Thunderbolt interface card either.

The UAD DSP Accelerators are the same DSPs as in the Apollo interfaces, but they're in PCI Express card form and don't have the audio interface part attached. They're [i]just[/i] the DSP.

But I have a lot of non-Universal Audio plugins and if I was looking at dropping £1000 or so on updating a rig that had a seven-year-old CPU at the core, I'd think about upgrading the heart of my system (CPU, motherboard, and new memory to go along with them), purely because it'd make everything about my system run faster, not just one specific set of plugins. That, for me, would be a smarter investment.

What I'd [b]really[/b] recommend you do, though, is work out which of the plugins you own are the real system hogs and see if you can get away with using fewer instances of them, or if you have alternatives which sound just as good but take up less resources. And like Guido says, look at room treatment.