How much i/o?

[PTPerson]

Howdy, doing a bit of research about my options currently.

I have 3 x 192 i/o (The 'vintage' stuff). From what I have read the 192 will work with the native card, will 3 or possibly 4? with extra D/A cards installed (ie, each 192 has 8 in, 16 out)

Most of the time I used ProTools simply as a tape machine and editor as it's connected to my console, do you suppose the Native system will work for this?

Cheers,

Stefan.

[SteveSZ]

I recently switched to HD Native and the old interfaces work fine with it. I am using a 96i with no problems. Personally speaking, I think the new card has tightened up the sound of the interface.

According to the Manual, HD Native will support up to 4 of the 192 interfaces at a time. In fact it says it will support 4 of practically any HD interface except the OMNI for some reason. It will only support 1 HD Omni.

Hope that helps.

[PTPerson]

Great stuff.

Have you come from an HD setup? How are you finding the Native card? it's quite a cheap option.

Are you having any trouble with latency and CPU? How many tracks are you recording simultaneously?

If I was to record say 20 tracks simultaneously with 10 or 20 playing am I asking for trouble?

Stef

[SteveSZ]

Originally Posted by PTPerson

Great stuff.

Have you come from an HD setup? How are you finding the Native card? it's quite a cheap option.

Are you having any trouble with latency and CPU? How many tracks are you recording simultaneously?

If I was to record say 20 tracks simultaneously with 10 or 20 playing am I asking for trouble?

Stef

I had been using HD2 TDM with a PCI Core card and a PCI Accel card since 2003 or 04 so I was stuck in ProTools 7 for a long time. I kept my eyes open for an easy opportunity to crossgrade because I had to change my computer and my cards at the same time. I have been very happy with the results.

I'm using a Quad Core Mac Pro now, and HD Native with ProTools 10.0.1. I have not yet run into significant latency issues. To be fair though, I have not had a chance to run more than 4 inputs at a time yet, I don't do a ton of tracking. What I can tell you is that I have loaded some fairly busy mixing sessions with 4 or 5 VI's and 20 - 30 tracks using 2 or 3 plug-ins per track and 3 or 4 aux returns with verb plugs that I had created in my old system. PT 10 and HDN don't seem to mind at all. The biggest strain I've seen in the system usage window is something like 37% capacity on PCI Native card.

According to the manual, HDN will handle 64 channels of I/O. I had a hard time wrapping my brain around the idea that one card and a quad-core were going to replace a duo core Mac with 2 PCI cards and 9 chips each, but it's been more than up to the task and I haven't really been able to make it sweat yet.

Hopefully someone who has done more live tracking with theirs will chime in, but I suspect that you're not going to have a problem changing over as long as your Mac is using a Nehalem or Westmere chip set.