Shoot out between two totally different solutions, designed for different applications and needs? That doesn't make any sense.

Totalmix FX has a set of rudimentary effects that get the job done, when you need a bit of reverb or delay for - say - the headphone mix of your singer when recording vocals. Also, the EQ and compressor are very basic tools, that are not primarily meant to record through them (although you could if you want to) but merely to monitor through them - bit of sweetening EQ or hipass filtering if needed. At least that's what I use them for - as well as mixing live with TMFX Remote and an iPad when nothing else is available. In most cases, the effects are ok for that. Just textbook, basic tools - nothing more, nothing less...

UAD-2 plugins are mostly emulations of existing gear that has those 'special abilities' or 'mojo' - whatever you might call it. Nothing I would associate with the offerings in TMFX

HTH

@fripholm: Agreed or in other words .. [with some additions, which represent my personal perception / opinion]

UAD focuses on recreating old well known devices ("mojo"). This emulation costs them much time (development) and they want to protect their intellectual property. The CPUs on their cards on the one hand run these plugins to unload the main CPU in the PC, but on the other hand they also act as kind of HW dongle. Some of the plugins require much performance, so that there is a tendency that customers need to/should buy the most performant cards to ensure to have enough resources left for running all of them, especially with bigger recording projects. In terms of costs: buying a lot of these plugins means also to spend really a lot of money. In terms of PC resources: you might need to sacrificy even more PCIe sockets of your system to add additional cards (I think up to 3 can be combined in one PC if I remember right). But then it might already be difficult to have PCIe slots left for other purposes and eventually also recording cards.

In terms of performance: CPUs in PCs are nowadays very performant. UAD plugins that could be used natively running on an Intel or AMD CPU in a PC would be more than welcome performance and cost wise. But as I mentioned, they use the daughter cards with SHARC CPUs also for copy protection reason (and of course this creates some $$$ on top for the cards). I do not regard this as a very flexible solution, especually as it fills up your PCIe Slots which you might want to have for other purposes.

So .. such an UAD solution is perfect for people who want this mojo from one manufacturer and where you can get additional CPU power by PCIe cards or a separate box to be connected via thunderbolt.

But with some UAD solutions you "mix" here the thematics "recording interface" and "platform to run plugins".
Esp. the latter raises complexity of a recording device, which should be a robust stable thing.

I personally would like to have ultra stability for the recording interface and its software mixer, as software plugins tend to make solutions more complex and increase the likeliness of instabilities.

RME focuses on delivering very professional, performant and stable recording gear with a high feature density.
Look, what you get i.e. packages in 1 RU when looking at the flagship interfaces UFX II, UFX+....

RME offers recording interfaces, preamps, converters, MADI solutions. Really "round" solutions that you do not find anywhere else. Besides the very flexible TotalMix FX you get also SW solutions like Digicheck (very professional audio analysis tools) for free. For tools like that you would normally have to pay a lot additionally to get this as plugins. Digicheck gets the data directly from the recording interface as an additional ASIO client, so the data shown are very precise and quickly available.

Or look at "global record". A rock stable recording solution if stability is a must during a recording session.

Other on top features which makes the RME "bundle" round are solutions to remote control device via MIDI or MIDI over MADI if you have a MADI based setup. Or the "Multichannel Wave File Batch Processor" to get the tracks out of a multichannel Wav file, which has been recorded by Durec capable devices like UFX, UFX II or UFX+.

TotalMix FX is the best and most flexible mixing software that I know, which is highly optimized for the purpose to control your recording interface, the routing, save and recall settings in a very pleasent way, to remote control AUX devices and also save their settings (Octamic XTC), controlling Durec, plus supporting a remote control like ARC USB or even being remote controller by MIDI.

With UFX+ / TotalMix FX you can connect up to 8 Octamic XTC via MADI, configure the devices as AUX devices and by this digitally save the most often used / most important config settings fully digital in this one TM FX instance, including any to any routing.

TotalMix FX is the software layer needed between recording interface and DAW to make it possible to create monitor and headphone mixes with near "zero latency" when you sing in.

The FX effects (when the device has a FX chip additionally on board) are basic effects of already good quality to be able to satisfy certain immediate demands. Reverb for a vocalist while singing in, not having to create time consuming routings on the DAW side to get the reverb back to the singer and without the longer way back over USB/Firewire/Thunderbolt. The effects section is directly there at the recording device at your fingertips.

As you can see RME focuses more on a robust recording interface part. Therefore things like VST plugins for TM FX will much likely never come. We see already in Cubase and other DAWs that some VSTs or combination of VSTs create issues. With an RME solution this will not happen.

When looking for a RME recording device one tip. The product (mixer) has been renamed from "TotalMix" to "TotalMix FX",
as it became a major overhaul.
If you are looking for FX support on a RME product, then you need to look separately whether the interface has a FX section built-in and whether its a full FX section or not.
Example:
- BBF, BBF Pro, MADIface: some of the effects are rendered on the PC (using the CPU of the PC)
- UCX, 802, UFX, UFX II, UFX+, MADIface XT,  HDSPe MADI FX have a complete FX chip on board
- UC, AIO, RayDAT, HDSPe MADI and some other have no FX chip on board, so no FX support

This simply meant as a tip when it comes to the recording interface selection.
I created a PDF which compares some (not all !!) RME interfaces: https://www.tonstudio-forum.de/index.ph … 17-12-pdf/

If you want to see the versatility of RME interfaces for professional studios, then you can simply have an informational look at the MADI Info Center on the RME Web page: http://www.rme-audio.de/products/madi-setups.php