You literally can’t turn off that saturation on those UAD plugins- as they have modeled the actual boxtone of the units. The tube makeup gain stage of a pultec is constantly there, even with the EQ set flat. The Fairchild, LA2A, TLA-100A, LA3A, 1176 collection and others also color the sound without any compression happening.

Back in the day when I was tracking with clean pres and no outboard gear I used the UAD plugins a lot, but now that I record with more flsvored pres and use outboard compression amd EQ on the way down I gravitate towards cleamer sounding plugins because my tracks enter the DAW with plenty of tone, so I don’t need it from plugins anymore. I have also experienced the phenomena of having too many of those harmonics piled up on eachother.

I know you can't turn saturation off, but assuming that a model is reasonably accurate (and UA's surely are) then just like with the hardware there will be nominal operating level.

And my point was just that in the past the exact same tools were used all the time to make recordings that we still love decades later - arguably because the engineers knew when to exceed nominal operating level and when not to.

Now, if you're using "more flavored pres" etc. then obviously you may not need more "flavor" from UA plugins, but that has nothing to do with the plugins themselves and everything to do with the rest of the stuff you're using. I think it was the same in the past where you wouldn't go far above nominal in a series of tools unless you really wanted that "colored" sound... and if you didn't then surely you'd combine some aggressive units with some tools that were squeaky clean.

Nothing wrong with saturation, it's how you use it. Many people who didn't grow up with analog don't know how to I think.

Completely under valued bundle from Waves hopefully they just keep it running on new OS's nd NEVER update it...I've had it for 20 years and still reach for it...sometime les is a LOT more.

The only plugins that get me excited these days, are utility type plugins. Like ADPTR Metric AB, really cool plugin for reference checking.

But the most popular part of the modeled characteristic of these units is how they react when they are "driven". Just like many hardware units, you can often work the input against the output and get different amounts of distortion.

Poorly modeled plugins are usually dismissed as 'linear'. They have the same boxtone at all levels. But some of the better modeled plugins yield different sound - including the coveted saturations - when you "push" them. People even proudly refer to this as "abuse". It's not a switch you can turn off, but it is still somewhat under the engineer's control in a lot of these plugs.

We seem to live in a world where the abuse is now the standard and the nominal use of the gear is considered 'boring'.

This makes sense. And I think it's common misconception that saturation is something that automatically occurs...when it's not true at all. Saturation literally means, too much of something. Saturation only occurs, when the gain is over driven, and the signal is normalized to a usable gain stage by having the output trim lowered so as to not clip the converters.

Neve preamps for instance, can sound pretty clean with minimum gain and a healthy output trim.

The tonal characteristic I think people are referring to, is the transformer coupled design of these circuits...and not the THD achieved through "saturating" a signal.