For that reason, I'd hazard a very confident guess that your colleague didn't detect UAD's band-limiting just by listening! There are perfectly intelligent engineering reasons for deliberately curtailing the frequency response in this way and, most importantly of all, our own ears are band-limited too. The vast majority of microphones and loudspeakers, for example, roll off at around 25kHz (or lower), and most analogue audio equipment - preamps, dynamics processors, mixing consoles and all the rest - is also all band-limited. At the end of the day it is the sound that matters, not what an FFT spectrum display looks like.īefore I explain the sensible reasons for UAD's band-limiting approach, it might be worth revisiting the real world of audio engineering, where everything is band-limited to some degree. Is there any dishonesty involved? No! This is a simple disparity between intelligent and pragmatic engineering versus misguided expectations derived from marketing hype.

The very short explanation is that this is a deliberate and pragmatic engineering compromise, and without it the UAD plug-ins just wouldn't sound as good as they do. Your colleague is quite correct, though, in his assertion that some - but certainly not all - of UA's plug-ins restrict the processed audio signal bandwidth to some degree. There are sometimes good technical reasons for, and benefits in, restricting the bandwidth within a high sample-rate project. SOS Technical Editor Hugh Robjohns replies: There's a small but important technical point I should make first of all: the sample rate determines the potential audio bandwidth, but the actual audio bandwidth does not alter the project sample rate. Engineers like myself (and I'm sure you!) are expected to deliver the highest quality product we can to our clients, and that includes high-bandwidth audio if they choose it. I love the UA plug-ins, but feel there is some dishonesty at play. As only one example, the 1176 emulation will not pass any audio above 28kHz, rendering any session that uses this plug-in on the master bus as effectively a 56kHz session, no matter the sample rate of the original project.

A colleague of mine recently discovered that the suite of Universal Audio Powered Plug-ins, which we all love and use, band-limits the audio in varying degrees depending on the plug-in. I'm a long time reader of Sound On Sound, and a studio owner.

How to use universal audio plugins