New to HDX....quite disappointed.

[KT Productions]

Thanks guys for all of your replies. I often dread posting on forums because of all the negativity I generally have to weed through to find the good stuff, but this has been a constructive experience....so cheers to that!

The HDX and the Native both have a gate array chip on board that is supposed to handle the mix bus (on HDX this is in addition to the DSP chips). Go anywhere that sells it (Sweetwater etc.) and you will find the following quote mere inches from the "Add to Cart" button:

"What's more, there's a separate FPGA processor for your mix bus, so all of your HDX card's DSP power is dedicated to running plug-ins."

There is actually a screen cap attached to my 1st our 2nd post showing that this is a lie.

What I take from my small amount of real life use (and I think Mixchump also helped validate this in his reply) is that it all goes out the window when using separate outputs. Mixchump's setup is a hybrid DSP \ Native solution allowing him to take advantage of the low latency monitoring HDX has to offer during tracking, but for me, I hoped to improve (not destroy) the monitoring of things like virtual instruments when recording, since any physical inputs (whether analog or digital) I would be monitoring at the console with no latency any ways.

You can't get blood from a stone, as they say, so in a sense I suppose I'm just venting my frustration. I've just been racking my brain as to whether or not to order a 2nd HDX or abort mission. I suppose comfort reverb \ delay for vocal talent would be the one real benefit, but I had been handling that a number of different ways prior to HDX any ways. HD Native PCIe cards are definitely available 2nd hand, I just worry about Avid pulling the rug out from under our feet on that particular product (after all, they had motivation of some kind to stop making it in the first place). Also.....voice packs? Really? LMAO. Absolute gangsters.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by KT Productions

The HDX and the Native both have a gate array chip on board that is supposed to handle the mix bus (on HDX this is in addition to the DSP chips). Go anywhere that sells it (Sweetwater etc.) and you will find the following quote mere inches from the "Add to Cart" button:

"What's more, there's a separate FPGA processor for your mix bus, so all of your HDX card's DSP power is dedicated to running plug-ins."

(as I suspected earlier in this thread) I think somebody at Sweetwater is confused by the FPGA chip on a HD Native card that provides a mixer used for low-latency monitoring, and that has nothing to do with the mix bus inside Pro Tools. IIRC that is not even implemented on HDX... although there is a similar FPGA chip that provides glue functions on the board. If you purchased HDX from Sweetwater because of this mis-information I'd except them to look after you and provide a full refund.

[YYR123]

Originally Posted by KT Productions

What I take from my small amount of real life use....is that it all goes out the window when using separate outputs.


HD Native PCIe cards are definitely available 2nd hand, I just worry about Avid pulling the rug out from under our feet on that particular product...

I had HD Native for a few years and iirc you only can Delay comp 1 stereo set of outputs, it’s either that or there’s only low latency monitoring on only one set of outputs I don’t remember which one it is.

So you need to look into the details if you go with HD Native, b/c I am pretty sure there is a limit to either one or both, but it’s worth you looking into

[corp]

Originally Posted by Mixchump

First of all, let me say that I'm thrilled that you're making music at 192kHz, and for those of you that have just simply said 'work at 96kHz', you don't know what you're missing. If we could do 384kHz in ProTools, even better, but for now, 192k is great. Why? Because it's not about the top end. At all. It's about the detail in everything in the time domain. Room Mics especially sound awesome, and the grainy, sandy quality that crash cymbals have at lower sample rates (and especially the 'S's in vocals) are MUCH smoother. So let's dispense with that argument right away.

I track a lot of music at 192k, and on a practical level, here's my take on it. The DSP mixer on the HDX card(s) uses a LOT of DSP for the physical outputs because each output is essentially a summing point. If you look at the IO setup, you'll see that every output is an internal bus, connected to a physical output. I’m sure there are reasons why they don’t allow us to connect a single mono track to a single physical output, but the under-the-hood design of Avid’s HDX card means that a session with 28 physical outputs also has 28 summing busses using up DSP.

The gist of it is this. Unless and until some other DAW developer can go head-to-head with the ProTools application and it’s integration with DSP and hardware at near-zero latency, we’re stuck with it. In order for me to do a tracking session at 192kHz with a basic session (Drums, Elec Bass, Elec Gtr, Piano, guide vocal) I absolutely HAVE to have a minimum of two HDX cards. The combination of creating headphone mixes, and just a couple of basic reverbs is already a DSP-maxed situation.

I highly encourage you to borrow or rent a second HDX card and continue on with your plan. I also own an HD-Native PCIe card, and I can guarantee you that it will be even more frustrating (for different reasons), and the other options (UAD Apollo, Orion, Apogee, etc.) will all be equally (if not more) frustrating in Native world…

Once you get to mix world, your options will open up substantially.

I chose to go with Merging’s HORUS interface and I use HDX-2 for tracking with a DigiLink connection, and then for mix, I switch to the Ravenna/AES67 playback engine (all native CPU with Ethernet Audio IO) so that I can access the horsepower of my Intel CPUs and I don’t get hammered by losses of voices every time I drop a Native plugin on an Aux Channel or Master Fader…. And the Native mix engine sounds MUCH better than HDX does.

Anyhow, I feel your pain, but you’re one HDX card away from being extremely happy with your setup…

Cheers, eh?

Spot on pertaining to 192k and moving to 384k.

There's many who disagree with this perspective and that's why I have posted on why hasn't Avid updated their 8 year old HDX card to support 384k since Avid markets the MTRX as

"Supports 44.1 kHz–384 kHz, as well as DSD 64/DSD 128 with high precision internal clock and PLL"

[Mixchump]

Hey, just checking back in on this thread... Any Luck @KT Productions with your rig? Hope you're rockin' that setup and making some great music...