Universal AudioReviews of uaudio.com

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to do a side by side comparison of audio interfaces by different manufacturers. I was a little shocked at how much better the Apollo interfaces sounded compared to competitors. I now own an Apollo Twin Mk2 and Apollo x6. Both are fantastic. I had a recent experience with their customer support, which was pretty good overall - especially after the case was forwarded to a senior specialist. Plugin quality is pretty outstanding. But - while they sound great, are stable, and work well, the installer always installs all plugins - including the ones you have not purchased - in all formats, which literally wastes gigabytes of disk space, and requires tedious manual clean up after every install and update.

I'll just say that I wanted the UAD PCI card many years ago then came the Apollo line. So I eventually built a PC specifically to be TB3-compatible for an Apollo. I paired it was an Apollo Twin X Heritage Edition. The Apollo would work perfectly fine with Pro Tools, but system audio was completely broken and silent. I reached out to get support, but they have a small window of maybe 2 hours a couple days a week for phone support, and the young guy I spoke with didn't even have any experience with PCs. He didn't even set up the ticket that he said he would. In the end, I had to troubleshoot everything myself and discovered by accident that the Microsoft microphone privacy settings were blocking the audio. Once I disabled that, it worked for both DAWs and desktop audio, but there still were occasional pops. Then I finally gave in and bought a MacBook M1 Pro and it worked perfectly. All this aside, I wanted the plugins they offered, and I got them, and my mixes never sounded better. I love the plugins, but I hate how poorly they support PCs. Things aren't all roses on Macs either, as UA Connect will eventually freeze and seem to no longer work when you try to open it. This leads many to reinstall UA Connect over and over again, but actually what is needed is to kill the task in the Activity Monitor and then it loads up again. There is so much that I hate when it comes to the issues revolving around UAD, but in the end, once you have all these quirks figured out, the sound is top-notch. You can't really get much better. For this reason alone, I give it 4 stars. If there were different rating tiers for the hardware and ecosystem, it would be: Quality: ★★★★★ Value: ★★★★☆ Ease of use: ★☆☆☆☆ Support: ★☆☆☆☆ Compatibility: ★★★☆☆ Again, when it delivers, it's tops, so my rating is biased toward the actual use. I've got everything figured out now and know how to troubleshoot if there is an issue. The problem is that you might have to jump through hoops to get it working with your setup and their guides and support might lead no where forcing you to find answers elsewhere like on Reddit.

I must say that UA is by far one of the best when it comes to plug-ins. Very easy to use and very professional sound. I am glad that you guys got rid of the ILok for licenses which makes it so much easier to work offline. I love that you buy their products and basically gets to keep and own the licenses and still are able to update without paying subscription. Why did I give 4 stars and not 5 well some of the plugins are very power sensitive when putting them together with other brands. I don’t know why that is?!

Bit overpriced but one of the best sounds on the market.