[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by KT Productions

Keep in mind I'm not running out of voices. I had a decent understanding of how voices worked before ordering (although I didn't know about how the punch modes affected it)

I did my homework, but I'm not gonna say I read the whole reference guide (maybe the cliffs notes?)

What bothers me is Avid's marketing. If the DSP chips are not at all involved with the mix bus, and solely for plugins, why am I out of DSP without a single plugin in the session?

Mmm sorry I had misread that as you were running out of voices... and when I did a quick think about it in my head I that seemed quite plausible. If you are running out of DSP what does the system usage monitor show that is going on? (can you post a screenshot). And you may want to do a pencil and paper voice budget calculation anyhow, correctly accounting for stereo tracks (including any stereo tracks holding VIs), native plugin use (again VIs), punch ins, running HEAT pre-insert with native plugins, etc.

I'm not sure what marketing you are talking about. Not saying it is not there, I've just not noticed that implication that DSPs are not used on the mix bus? Are you confusing that with the the claims about the zero latency mixer on HD Native? DSPs sure do the mixing on HDX. That is what makes a "track" actually work. The internal architecture the tracks interface to even looks like a DSP plugin, and you see them show up in the DSP performance monitor as 'mixer'.

They also love to claim that "When you’re faced with dozens of audio sources, hundreds of tracks, and thousands of clips, only one system can give you the power to deliver. Pro Tools | HDX."

These claims couldn't be further from the truth.

Marketing sigh, with enough caveats that one may be true. I think most of us know that a large native systems can do a damn lot, it's the low-latency tracking with monitoring though plugins that really is the domain of HDX, very large IO counts and overcoming some of the marketing crippling on Pro Tools Extreme on HD Native.

I probably don't need HDX. Avid stopped making HD Native PCIe, which surely means they will soon enough stop supporting it. I have no interest in a thunderbolt solution, so I was trying to play ball, so to speak. I thought I was getting the best money could buy.

Yes the PCIe card going away is pretty stupid, I would have looked hard for a used one.

I also wanted the lowest possible latency, for recording things that aren't going through the console (ie virtual instruments). Came to find out that's a joke. Does any one even know of a single AAX-DSP virtual instrument?

There are no sample based VIs, for good reason, the DSP processors don't have the easy access to main memory and storage, and are just the wrong place to do sample based stuff. This has come up a lot on the DUC before. Obviously if you mean latency while tracking MIDI and monitoring though a VI that's one thing, but if you are having latency playing back through the VI while recording other stuff like your drums then something else is likely wrong. You can also freeze/commit VI tracks to save voices (if they become the issue).

I'll take the blame for not reading up on that, but at a quick glance they do make it look like everything in their bundle is going to run on your DSP, then you find out the virtual instruments do not (kick in the nuts #1), then you find out that the latency is going to be worse than it was in you old DAW since you're running a native instrument on a DSP based DAW. Wow.

All this after having to buy a new PC (when there was nothing wrong with my old one) just to get the thing running. So could I return HDX? Probably, but not Pro Tools Ultimate, and not really the new computer either.

Unfortunately you may have saved some pain by asking here before purchasing stuff, I still expect your dealer should have helped more, and as suggested by the other recent post here HDX2 may be enough to solve your issues. Or if HDX is not the thing, you can always find that used HDN card and return or sell the HDX card... put the new shiny PC to good use.

These SOS articles may help as well.
https://www.soundonsound.com/techniq...unts-pro-tools
https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/avid-hdx