Upgrading HD Native System - PCIe Chassis or Native Thunderbolt?

[MikeC]

Hi Guys,

I wanted to ask a question about the best way forward to upgrade an older cheese grater Mac Pro/HD Native PCIe/Avid Omni IO.

My business partner has recently bought a MacBook Pro M2 Max which is a big step up in terms on compute power but I can’t see a compatible chassis to host the HD Native PCIe card.

I then thought about the HD Native Thunderbolt interface, unfortunately no longer made. And I've seen a few threads where people claim compatibility issues with newer machines.

So does anyone have any ideas on what we could do? Ideally it would be a chassis for the HD Native PCIe card. Or the HD Native Thunderbolt interface if we know it will be compatible and we can find one.

Many thanks in advance,

Mike

[CygnusX-1Bk2]

I have a Mac Studio Ultra that I upgraded from my old 2010 cheesegrater last year. I bought a Helios 3 TB chassis from OWC that is compatible. There was an issue with PT 2022.12 and 2023.3 and pcie chassis that was resolved with 2023.6. Rock solid since. The Studio is an excellent machine; boots up in around 10 seconds from the tone and PT boots much faster as well. I am running Natively for the most part, no more Rosetta for me if I can help it. Right now only Altiverb is my biggest hold out.


Mac Studio 2022, (macOS 12.6.8) Apple M1 Ultra, 64 GB RAM
ProTools Ultimate 2023.6
HD Native, Helios 3 Thunderbolt chassis

[Darryl Ramm]

And there was a HD Driver issue in 2023.6 that was solved by Avid deleting that driver and rolling back to the one in 2023.3.

And HD Native Cards are also no longer made. But yes I get you have one now.

All this Digilink stuff is a lot of faffing around for something obviously dead/dying and Avid struggling to provide basic driver support for. Especially it’s just an Omni I would sell what you have and buy a quality third party USB or Thunderbolt interface. My first choice would be an RME Fireface UCX II or UFX III but there are many other great choices. Or if you want to stay in the Avid house, then maybe a MTRX Studio with the new Thunderbolt card (now hopefully finally available). And that is a huge step up from an Omni.

Depending on what you are doing you might also want to sell your Ultimate license and just run Studio and save some ongoing software costs once you no longer need Ultimate to support DigiLink.

[MikeC]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for your thoughts. Interesting to hear that the Helios 3 TB chassis might work. Funny how there's not a mention on that chassis here https://avid.secure.force.com/pkb/ar...-Compatibility

And agree that the HD Native/Omni is a bit long in the tooth but I think we'd like to find a way of working around what we have rather than replace. I have a UAudio Apollo in my studio and that's great.

Thanks for your help,

Mike

[Darryl Ramm]

Between Avid and Sonnet they unfortunately mess up the clarity here.

That Avid Thunderbolt Chassis note at https://avid.secure.force.com/pkb/ar...-Compatibility is badly done. The reader is left to guess if any chassis there supports HD Native, if the ones named HDX blah.. support HD Native or only HDX or if the ones with footnotes about HDX cards also support HD Native. Somebody reading this might be left with the impression Avid has picked up and run away from any HD Native chassis support. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And unfortunately Sonnet screw up as well, the compatibility chart you are likely to find through Google searching for Sonnet chassis and HD Native is this old out of date one: https://www.sonnettech.com/support/c...lt/legacy.html From 2014, I bet lots of folks don't notice that date. Jeez Sonnet ya think you would avoid that/go fix your Google search results.

Ah what you maybe really wanted was this: https://www.sonnettech.com/support/d...patibility.pdf but that's pretty hidden on the Sonnet web site.

But even that PDF does not include the latest info on the recalled 2023.6 HD driver, and uh no support at all for Apple Silicon driver seems wrong.

This kind of silly mess would be the death hammer to DigiLink if it was my system. Just about any higher-end/quality interface vendor provides better support than this.

[LDS]

Originally Posted by MikeC

Hi Guys,

Thanks for your thoughts. Interesting to hear that the Helios 3 TB chassis might work. Funny how there's not a mention on that chassis here https://avid.secure.force.com/pkb/ar...-Compatibility

And agree that the HD Native/Omni is a bit long in the tooth but I think we'd like to find a way of working around what we have rather than replace. I have a UAudio Apollo in my studio and that's great.

Thanks for your help,

Mike

The Omni is a dark horse of an interface because of the unique feature set. For a lot of people it doesn’t make sense, but if it suits your needs you will spend countless hair pulling hours faffing around trying to find a suitable ‘better’ replacement. For all the bells and whistles of the current MTRX line, they make it really hard and expensive to add surround sound monitoring via AES. None of them automatically compensate for AD/DA latency. None of the preamps have insert points for outboard compression and EQ to tape. Very simple things that make day to day work so much easier.

The monitor section in the Omni is great, as is the additional cue control. It also sounds terrific. And it also has extraordinarily low latency. The lowest of any native interface I have measured in Pro Tools, probably because it avoids ASIO/Coreaudio entirely. The only place it falls short is immersive monitoring support. The Omni is such a specific little gem of an interface that I have been considering returning to one after years of using DAD stuff.

Beware the guise of progress. All tue newer ‘better’ stuff can very much be two steps forward, three steps back. And that is really where all the faffing around comes from.

I can’t comment on Apple Silicon support. HD Native is still working fine here on Intel Mac and PC machines. The anticipated release of 2023.9 is probably the one to keep an eye on. 2023.6 HD drivers was meant to fix some issues with Apple silicon but messed up a bunch of other stuff in the process. Hopefully it is all resolved in the next release.

[Darryl Ramm]

Excellent pro-Omni arguments. It was/is an impressive box and very well thought out for the target market. I would however give thought in any migration/upgrade esp. to Apple Silicon and needing to buy expansion chassis if you want to put up with all the extra messing around.

[R4000]

I'm also running a Mac Studio Ultra; I've not had much luck with the PCIe native card running in a Sonnet Chassis (echo express IIIe); throws up many errors on playback, and this wasn't fixed by rolling back to the 2023.3 HD driver. I bit the bullet and bought a used thunderbolt native box and that's worked flawlessly.

In terms of interface I highly recommend the focusrite Red 16 line as it can work either natively over thunderbolt with core audio, or in PT mode into the HD Native card. It has extensive monitoring options, and surround monitoring easily set up via rednet control. It also sounds great. Their other Red range interfaces have mic amps options if that's something that would be useful to you. Dante is an added bonus.

[SaschaP]

I was in the same position: 5,1 Mac Pro / Omni / HD native PCIe upgrading to a Mac Studio.

I ended up using a Nestor PCIe to TB2 chassis. It has 3 full length slots and is currently running my HD Native card, a UAD DSP card, and a USB 3 expansion card flawlessly. The TB3 chassis seem to have a lot of issues, but TB2 works great. You can find these boxes for under $200 on ebay.

[Darryl Ramm]

(Mostly for other folks finding this thread…) The Thunderbolt 3 issues are well known and relate to a flaw in Avid’s cards. That is why the Thunderbolt 3 Chassis from Sonnet that do work reliably include a switch (confusingly labeled “HDX” although it applies to HD Native as well) that put the PCIe slots in PCIe 2 not PCIe 3 mode. Older chassis with a Thunderbolt 2 connection get there as well since Thunderbolt 2 provides PCIe 2 slots.