Why no portable HDX interface?

[edwinstar]

I wonder why Avid isn‘t producing a portable HDX interface? I often hear people raving about UAD Apollos and how cool it is to record with plugins, but on the other hand i hear them telling me how outdated a HDX system is. Any ideas why they (Avid) are not doing it?

[Darryl Ramm]

There is no DigiLink system that can operate without attached IO peripherals. So that might important to solve first. I think that may have been promised for HD Native and never delivered.

A HDX card is quite large. It's not likely to be a small portable package, unless you gutted the capacity a lot. You may not save a lot over what you can do with a HDX Card in an external Thunderbolt chassis today.

HDX low latency when tracking through plugins and lots of IO connectivity don't seem pressing items for use on a portable computer, that's likely more live tracking and mixing sessions, stuff that can be done with native plugins.

Lots of work for a small market.

Avid may not have development staff available. I expect the folks that did HDX and HD Native are long gone.

State of Thunderbolt on Windows PC is still not great, would a mac only product fly?

[albee1952]

Interesting question. S3 is partially Mac-only in that it works as a controller on both platforms, but the interface part of it is Mac-only with AVB(still wish they would solve that one). Technically speaking, one might call the S3L a "portable" HDX system, but that's a bit of a stretch Then, one needs to define "portable" A rolling rack with a rack-mounted computer, a drawer with keyboard/mouse and a few digilink IO boxes is "portable" for some folks

[uptheoctave]

Stick an HDX card in an expansion chassis and attach an interface.
Will work with a MacBook Pro and you could fit everything in a 2u or 3u rack.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by octatonic

Stick an HDX card in an expansion chassis and attach an interface.
Will work with a MacBook Pro and you could fit everything in a 2u or 3u rack.

Yes, exactly and just doing lots of work to packaging a HDX card in a fancy box may not get you that much smaller to be worth that effort.