HD Native with Thunderbolt?

[L-Dogg]

Sorry to say but this box is ugly and cheap looking. I almost thought it was a joke at first. I assume it is not in fact cheap? Is that horrible looking rubber knob and the plastic headphone jack and awful....no dreadful, looking graphics.......the best Avid can do?

Seriously! I must be missing something.

[relaxo]

It's not a flashy interface box, it's a behind the scenes PCI card, hidden most of the time. I'm glad they didn't waste time/money making this utility box fancy.

[L-Dogg]

Hmm....okay, makes sense, thanks for clearing that up. I still think it looks nasty though!

[BobbyDazzler]

IMO it should be a slot option in an interface. It would be way tidier.
I guess this opens it up to 3rd party interfaces..... but still, thunderbolt straight to modded Omni/8x8 seems smarter to me.

[Bob Olhsson]

It would make a lot of sense for them to make a Thunderbolt/USB3 stand-alone high-end interface.

It would also make a lot of sense to hold off on manufacturing such a device until a lot more computers having Thunderbolt and USB3 can be tested. Lots of manufacturers got burned by early USB and FW implementations. By all accounts that's something no audio manufacturer can afford today.

[KMcK]

Originally Posted by nst7

Tony,

For those who already have an HD Native system with interface and PCIe card, will there be some kind of trade up deal to trade in just the PCIe card if they want to have this Thunderbolt box instead? Or alternatively, will the Thunderbolt box be sold separately (as hardware only, no software)?

Still waiting for an official answer to this.

The quote I got from my dealer was $1500. $1500 to trade in my current HD|Native card for the one in the thunderbolt box .

I'm assuming this cannot be correct since the HD|Native card itself can be purchased on ebay for about the same price, but that's the only info my dealer had. Considering my $380 OWC Helios box is doing just fine (albeit a bit noisy w/the fan) I can't see anyone getting on board with this new interface with that kind of pricing ($1120 more vs. the Helios for a wall wart and a headphone jack? WTF?). Would love to get clarification from Avid on this.

[nst7]

I agree that's insane. At that rate, it would probably make more sense to buy a bundle and sell the HD interface and the Protools license and keep the Thunderbolt unit.

[KMcK]

Something I didn't pick up on with the announcement but just saw in this unboxing video - there is only ONE Thunderbolt connection on this thing! So if the end of your thunderbolt chain terminates in something like, oh I dunno, an HDMI connection to a TV monitor (my current setup), well tough luck kid, you ain't using this box!

Wow. Super, über, WTFBBQ Fail!! Avid, what were you thinking??!

[Darryl Ramm]

This has been mentioned in other threads here including http://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?p...23#post1962823 As I say there it would be sad if this was just done to save a small amount of cost by using the cheaper single port/dual (not Quad) PCIe lane Intel ''Port Ridge' Thunderbolt controller chipset (at least on paper HD native certainly does not need 4 lanes of bandwidth, it could fit in one lane).

Darryl