Re: Need some HDX upgrade advice
Wow sorry for that, I don't know what I was looking at but I missed the stuff you said in the first post.
I'm not sure at all there is a simple answer, or even simple opinions. My 2c...
If live tracking with plugins is really hurting you now then sure look at HDX. I'm guessing there that your sessions are small enough to work on HDX1... that most of the plugins you want to use are available as HDX-DSP.
But by the time you buy a HDX card you might actually want to swap in a Carbon interface ... OK but your old Mac Pro Cheesegrater is not compatible... you might be able to smack away on that and run later versions of macOS but then I'm not sure if AVB will work--maybe not off the built-in Ethernet and you may need to add an Ethernet NIC card. Google around. If it was me I'd want to find a dealer who would loan me a Carbon to test out over weeks. Might be hard.
If for any reason your sessions do get large, maybe mix up native and DSP plugins a lot, please do some rough calculations to see if it will fit on a HDX1. And while talked about Avid has not delivered the hybrid mixer for HDX so I'd probably not go there over-optimistically and then get trapped and need a HDX2.... even if you have PCIe slot available. If/when a Hybrid mixer comes out I expect you'll need to be on a pretty recent version of macOS so you might have the same problem and need to smack around your Mac Pro to get it on a later macOS version.
As for buying a used HDX card... call me a coward, personally I would not buy a used card unless I knew the seller or could verify the card ran in a system recently and was pulled out and sold.
Damn the configuration/decision matrix for all this stuff gets complex fast, maybe doing nothing and staying native is the right thing... maybe until you move beyond your current Mac Pro and/or Avid releases something new in HDX land. And if you are working with a hardware console today and it's giving problems... maybe I'd just replace that.... do you really need something as big as a Ghost (what 32 channels?).
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