Apollo Quad with D control

[vinnyvenditto1]

I currently have a D Control HD2 with a 192 and a 96 with the PCI cards... I bought a new Mac pro and realized that I need the PCIe cards so instead of buying new card Im thinking about getting the apollo quad... will my d control still work with the D control?

[Darryl Ramm]

The time to think about all this is before you upgrade your Mac. And I suspect there is more to this question than "will it work"... will what work exactly? What are you doing?

You mean will your D Control surface still work to control Pro Tools with the Apollo Quad?

Well sure it will since it's Pro Tools that the D Control is controlling.

The Apollo Console is not controlled at all via a D Control or any other control surface, so you need to use the mouse for that, and if you are looking at say tracking though Apollo console plugins you need to think about that workflow and realize it is going to more involve the computer and mouse.

And the other, and maybe main issue is you are obviously on some Pro Tools 10 or earlier version. Do you want to stay on that or are you trying to upgrade to Pro Tools 12? What about TDM plugin support? You loose all that without the TDM/HD cards.

You have a Pro Tools HD license, which will give you things like surround support with the Apollo, but the CoreAudio IO limits in Pro Tools will limit you to 32 IO, not matter how many Apollo boxes you stack on there.

Unfortunately HD/TDM cards won't run in a Thunderbolt PCIe expansion chassis.

When you say instead of buying what new card? Do you mean the HD Native PCIe card (and using an expansion chassis?). You could use an used/unbundled Pro Tools HD Native thunderbolt box and that gets you compatibility with your interfaces but that gives you no TDM plugin support, but it does lets you move up to Pro Tools 12.

Other practical setup questions probalby exist e.g. monitoring setups. You using XMon today? Want to keep using that? Want to monitor straight out the Apollo?