UAD-1 card

[Laguna Rising]

Just had a visit from a friend of mine, and he's also into music recording (soundtracks, jingles, radio stuff editing, etc).
He said an UAD-1 card will help me using many plugs without loading CPU.
I can have good quality compressor, channel strip, reverb, and some guitar cab emulator (bread and butter stuff)
and save computer horsepower for other particular effects plugs, and VSTi
Is that for real ?
Anyone experienced that ?

Cheers

[rharv]

It's a known product.  He speaks the truth, however not every system plays nice with the UAD card.  IRQ's and all that.  But the concept is true- you use a seperate CPU on the card to handle the effects you have in that format. Kind of like the Creative and EMU cards have onboard effects that run from the card instead of the main system.. The effects are nice sounding from what I've heard. 
 Remember though that you tying up a slot and some resources to run that card also, so the tradeoff isn't totally free to the system.

Googling should give some other opinions and reviews.

[Laguna Rising]

Cool thanks ! 
I'm going to do some research...

[Moon]

Also... mind that you can only run a limited number of simultanious plugin's on this card, for more, you buy a second, third, or fourth card.

There are also alternatives for this product e.g. http://www.tcelectronic.com/PowerCore.asp

Moon