32 Channel - Apple Silicon - Pro Tools Rig in 2023 ?

[JFreak]

Yeah, you will get more helpful suggestions by defining your budget. For me "affordable" means buy it once, set it up and forget it. Which would make my recommendation an Apogee symphony II thunderbolt box with two 16x16 cards installed, but it is on the expensive side. Then again, for some it would be peanuts.

[T-Low]

Originally Posted by LDS

"Off the desk" in a JH-636 probably means the main mix bus, which is post 'multitrack recorder' due to the inline design.

Exactly, just like a tape machine
all monitoring, the mix buss, headphone cues etc. happen "behind" Pro Tools
so latency is very important to me

Thanks Darryl for the details

[T-Low]

Originally Posted by JFreak

Yeah, you will get more helpful suggestions by defining your budget. For me "affordable" means buy it once, set it up and forget it. Which would make my recommendation an Apogee symphony II thunderbolt box with two 16x16 cards installed, but it is on the expensive side. Then again, for some it would be peanuts.

With an interface like the Apogee Thunderbolt on a M1/M2 Mac
are there any disadvantages in terms of latency / stability compared to an old HD system ?

I never had a chance to test a native rig like this

f.x.
80 tracks of audio, 96khz/24, buffer at 32
bussed to 32 outputs to the console
punch in / out 16 tracks on the fly
ADC : tracking vocals thru a compressor plug in, recording a missing vocal overdub in a finished mix etc.

[LDS]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Doh, thanks for that, it probably explains it. I'd have to see more, but I hope you could mess with it enough to be able to dedicate some channels/faders to monitoring--duplicating monitored inputs to both a "monitor" and "to tape" channels?

No, no. Those desks are quite flexible and do include two signal paths per channel - one pre multitrack recorder and one post. You can monitor off either. What I mean by "off the mix bus" is really just keeping everything post-multitrack recorder. MCI always describe it as 'Mix'.

Those old desks were designed to be used with multitrack tape. There is a second part of the equation in their design, which is the three monitoring modes in reel to reel machines. Monitoring off the repro head has inherent latency based on its distance from the record head, so to do overdubs you would flip all of your playback channels to the sync heads and all of your recording channels to monitor off the input of the tape machine. Everything is being monitored off the post-multitrack side of the desk channels. The desks were designed taking that into consideration.

A DAW doesn't have those three monitoring modes. You can brute force your way through it with channel routing but if it were me, I would prefer to just grab some converters with suitably low latency and leave everyone monitoring post 'tape' in a kind of overdub mode. It would also let me start each session using a template of some kind. Outboard already patched in, faders at unity. Then just tweak preamp levels to 'tape'. Adjust cue sends to artist tastes, and let them enjoy an already roughed in mix.

Everyone works differently though.

The low latency database might be helpful in choosing converters - https://gearspace.com/board/music-co...data-base.html

Depending on your budget, two used Lynx Aurora 16s and a pair of Lynx AES16e PCIe cards might fight the bill? Or if you can find it, a Presonus Quantum 4848. It is a straight 32 analogue in and out over thunderbolt, and very decently low latency. They have been discontinued, but might be around on the used market.

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by T-Low

With an interface like the Apogee Thunderbolt on a M1/M2 Mac are there any disadvantages in terms of latency / stability compared to an old HD system ?

I never had a chance to test a native rig like this

f.x.
80 tracks of audio, 96khz/24, buffer at 32
bussed to 32 outputs to the console
punch in / out 16 tracks on the fly
ADC : tracking vocals thru a compressor plug in, recording a missing vocal overdub in a finished mix etc.

No. Runs like a charm and can be daisy-chained for even more i/o -- but single interface box gives you possibility for 32 i/o. Thunderbolt mode (default) is very fast and optional HD card emulates Avid HD which also means it slows down on HD mode.

[T-Low]

Originally Posted by LDS

Depending on your budget, two used Lynx Aurora 16s and a pair of Lynx AES16e PCIe cards might fight the bill? Or if you can find it, a Presonus Quantum 4848. It is a straight 32 analogue in and out over thunderbolt, and very decently low latency. They have been discontinued, but might be around on the used market.

Sorry .. I’m old school
yes, the MCI is a classic inline design like most of the SSL / Neve etc. consoles since the 80ies

With the Aurora PCIe i need a Mac with PCIe slots or some kind of chassis
The Presonus looks very interesting but as you mentioned its discontinued

I´m still uncertain about the Mac to Thunderbolt connection
Do i have to use routing software like RME Total Mix, Apogee Symphony Control
or just CoreAudio in Pro Tools ?

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by T-Low

I´m still uncertain about the Mac to Thunderbolt connection. Do i have to use routing software like RME Total Mix, Apogee Symphony Control or just CoreAudio in Pro Tools ?

Apogee Symphony Control is optional volume controller. Just a remote control to the front panel functions, nothing more.

I find it handy, but as far as PT is concerned it sees all the i/o in the i/o setup just like you would expect. If you use dedicated monitor controller and want to run i/o at unity, you can simply forget the software. On the other hand if you want to install the box in a server room, the software gives easy access to the front panel and you likely never need to walk to the hardware closet.

[LDS]

Originally Posted by T-Low

Sorry .. I’m old school
yes, the MCI is a classic inline design like most of the SSL / Neve / API etc. consoles since the 80ies

With the Aurora PCIe i need a Mac with PCIe slots or some kind of chassis
The Presonus looks very interesting but as you mentioned its discontinued

I´m still uncertain about the Mac to Thunderbolt connection
Do i have to use routing software like RME Total Mix, Apogee Symphony Control
or just CoreAudio in Pro Tools ?

Ain't nothing wrong with being old school. It makes sense to me to lean into the design of the MCI rather than trying to workaround it.

Thunderbolt is basically just PCIe over a more convenient cable. What about something like a Lynx Aurora(n) 32? 32 in and out via Thunderbolt, with terrific sound quality to boot. $6k new.

With RME Total Mix, you would just choose 'DAW Mode' from one of the dropdown menus when you first install it. Then just work in Pro Tools as usual.

May I ask what made your HDN experience chaotic and unstable? I moved from HD3 Accel to HDX2. When the Hybrid engine came along I moved from HDX2 to HDN because it worked so well natively on modern systems. My system also includes an RME HDSPe MADI card connected to the same DAD interface. RME PCIe stuff are some of the best performing native interfaces going around. I personally don't find my HDN card that far behind it in performance. It has a little bit more latency, but performs very well given its age.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by T-Low

I´m still uncertain about the Mac to Thunderbolt connectionDo i have to use routing software like RME Total Mix, Apogee Symphony Controlor just CoreAudio in Pro Tools ?

You don't have to do anything, what you want to do will depend on how you work and you/your talent's monitoring latency tolerance. If you want to software monitor/monitor though DAW plugins and can run with small enough H/W buffers you can disable TotalMix or others, absolutely no need to use them.

However if you want absolute minimal latency monitoring you can use TotalMix or similar to do your monitor routing in Totalmix and bypass any DAW latency (you still have the converter latency like you have on HD/TDM). But then you are screwed with punch in workflows.

Now not saying you have to, but the moment you start wanting to use hardware monitoring support in an interface the more I would push you to use RME products if for no other reason than Totalmix. It's nice at scale and feels more like a hardware console than some other products. It has a iPad control app that I use, and has MCU (but not Eucon) control surface integration. And you can do basic reverb etc cue mix effects within Totalmix FX (the version of Totalmix on newer interfaces, talk to me more if you actually want to buy RME stuff). My hope would be you don't want/need to use it except if you run into super latency sensitive performers and/or you are struggling with problems and have to increase the HW Buffer size (but in that case you may also be able to bounce out the mix and say use that in a new session to track against). And a reminder if you go with something like MADI Totalmix is implemented entirely within whatever RME MADI box or cards that attach to your computer, and you can use RME or any other vendors MADI connected interfaces, (same applies with RME ADAT interfaces).

How well things work for you is not just the interface latency specs, it's typically dominated on native DAWs by the H/W buffers adding input and output latencies. Here good interface device drivers (like from RME) also help you, but don't fall into the trap of just looking at interface hardware latency specs. There is lots of latency masturbation on some audio forums, over focusing on that won't necessarily help you.

And how small you can set the H/W buffers depends on how good your computer is, how carefully you have it set up/optimized, not having flakey plugins installed, and maybe sometimes which way the wind is blowing. But keeping that system set up very cleanly, not letting people futz with it, add stuff/plugins etc. can go a long way to helping. Workflow helps a lot. Keep heavy stuff out while tracking, and freezing/committing VI tracks or heavily processed tracks.

One suggestion is to just play with stuff. Do you have any CoreAudio interface you can connect to your existing Mac (with the needed driver/OS support)? You could play with that and your current computer and just see what you can get even if it only has a small number of I/O (hopefully a modern computer should get much better). You could also play with adding latency by inserting a *native* trim plugin behind some TDM plugin, maybe just a Trim TDM plugin if nothing else is on the track. Then you should get 2 x the HW buffer size latency just like you would with a native interface at the same HW buffer size. And just see how that sounds/feels to you. Hopefully you can still get that down to a small HW Buffer size even with your current older setup, and do so before running out of TDM voices. You could also do this with a TDM delay plugin adding 64, 128, 256 sample latency (to emulate the delay from a HW buffer size of 32, 64 or 128 samples, etc.) with any TDM delay plugin that does not color stuff and you can set fully wet. Then you can test with different delays independent of native processing performance. A great use for Eventide Precision Time Delay (on sale at the moment for $29 but I'm not sure how you buy the old TDM version by itself. I must resist going to the Eventide online store.... ).

Edit: And to pick up on what LDS is saying, if you had horrible problem with HDN it's maybe setup/optimization/workflow/other bugs you needed to look at there, maybe lack of host computer power, but not something to do with HDN itself. And while more modern interfaces might help a little (and a more modern version of Pro Tools on a Modern Apple silicon Mac might help a lot more), ... but I would not assume that any other interface is going to be much better than HDN say if you wanted to try to pick up a Thunderbolt HDN controller to use with your existing I/O boxes on a new computer. Now I'd not be touching DigiLink nowadays for anything new that was not HDX, but you already own the interfaces, so it may make sense. One down side vs RME is you have very limited hardware mixing support in HD Native hardware, and you don't have Totalmix as a backup/for use if needed.

[T-Low]

Originally Posted by LDS

May I ask what made your HDN experience chaotic and unstable? I moved from HD3 Accel to HDX2. When the Hybrid engine came along I moved from HDX2 to HDN because it worked so well natively on modern systems.

I had terrible CPU spikes on all buffer settings with PT 12.8 on the HDN card.
Very often a session opened with all plug ins greyed out . Maybe just a bad release, but i sold it and went back to TDM