HEAT ITB, versus analog summing?

[DaveBCC]

So I’m dawdling as usual, in my never ending quest to futz with my hardware. As I consider the upgrade from my LE stuff to the next level, the arrival of HEAT to HD Native creates another trade to consider.

I was just about sold on SSL Alpha Link/RME MADI card/CPTK, which gets you 24 channels of good conversion and pretty much all the HD editing capabilities. I only ever record ~4 channels at a time, and with 4 channels dedicated to monitoring, my plan was to use the remaining 16 channels for analog summing (Folcrom or similar).


As an alternative, we now have HD Native + Heat, which I think alleges to provide the warmth you get from analog summing. So, HD Native Card/Avid 8x8x8 IO, for about the same money as above, gets you all the HD editing capabilities and HD latency, but loses the summing capability.


So, analog summing, or HD+Heat ITB ... which way would you go?


Interested in hearing opinions and preferences, and thanks in advance!

[albee1952]

What have you seen that I missed. AFAIK, HEAT is TDM only and requires HD processing cards to operate. There are some great summing boxes available, or even sum thru something like the Toft ATB mixer. UAD now offers the Studer tape machine plugin and its impressive for ITB mixing. Then there's Nomad's Magnetic plugin, which also looks good(but I could not get the demo running on my rig).

[janmuths]

Mate, this is a very 'subjective' thing. Can think of many reasons to prefer the one or the other for sonic reasons. Are you doing music-mix or post or composing or editing or tracking? It all comes down to personal taste if you asked me. HEAT has many different sound colours, but will certainly not be able to emulate every single analog summing option. On the other hand - who has all the different analog summing options available anyway?

Mmm, back to facts. One advantage is that you are saving the HEAT settings with your session, so that may save you some time writing recall sheets if you often go fore and back between projects.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but are you sure that HEAT runs on HD|Native? This would be new to me. Just had a quick look and I couldn't find it on the AVID website. As far as I understand, HEAT is a TDM thing and TDM plugins are not supported on HD|Native.

Maybe I just made your decision easier.


J.

[DaveBCC]

DOH!!! Crap, sorry gentlemen, and thanks for straightening me out, I totally missed that. Since the step up to TDM is a factor of ~two over the systems I was talking about, that pretty much answers the question (at least for me).

Sorry for the trouble (now I wish I could delete the thread) ... live and learn.

Thanks again.

[TOM@METRO]

Take a look at Steven Slates VCC. It should be retailing soon. This thing sounds great.

[Parisstudio]

I love the HEAT plugin and tried the Slate VCC.

My opinion is get the Slate if you have Le and Heat with HD.

[Obsidian Dragon]

Originally Posted by Parisstudio

I love the HEAT plugin and tried the Slate VCC.

My opinion is get the Slate if you have Le and Heat with HD.

So as to not continue this confusion, Heat is for TDM only (not simply HD). Now that there is HD Native (with no TDM), it is not sufficient to just say HD. We must make the distinction between HD TDM and HD Native. So to paraphrase if I may be so bold.

...My opinion is get the Slate VCC if you have M-Powered, LE or HD Native and Heat with HD TDM.

[DaveBCC]

Got it, and thanks guys! Sorry for confusing the issue.