Native Monitoring/recording performance under Carbon?

[Ru_C]

Could anyone who has the HDX-Card/Carbon engine combo jump in on this?

I switched over to Pro Tools Ultimate/Native-Pcie-card from HD10 last year.

My plan was to try & get native running well enough for tracking big projects with low (enough) latency, & if that didn't work out, bite-the-bullet & buy an HDX card.

Long story short, after a month of system tweaking I got my setup running really well, & am tracking at 96k, 128sample buffer reliably & not really missing DSP at all, apart from a couple of very specific use cases.

Should I have to go down the HDX (with Carbon engine) route in the future, can I still just set the buffers low & track natively if you want? I.e, in cases where I want to monitor through plugins (using a Waves Amp Sim for example) where no DSP version exists?

I appreciate that the very point of DSP is to avoid this (I ran HD for 15 years previously), but I'd be interested to know if the HDX-Carbon combination has *worse* native tracking performance compared to a fully native system, or just the same.

Hope I've explained the question well enough !

[K Roche]

Originally Posted by Ru_C

Could anyone who has the HDX-Card/Carbon engine combo jump in on this?

I switched over to Pro Tools Ultimate/Native-Pcie-card from HD10 last year.

My plan was to try & get native running well enough for tracking big projects with low (enough) latency, & if that didn't work out, bite-the-bullet & buy an HDX card.

Long story short, after a month of system tweaking I got my setup running really well, & am tracking at 96k, 128sample buffer reliably & not really missing DSP at all, apart from a couple of very specific use cases.

Should I have to go down the HDX (with Carbon engine) route in the future, can I still just set the buffers low & track natively if you want? I.e, in cases where I want to monitor through plugins (using a Waves Amp Sim for example) where no DSP version exists?

I appreciate that the very point of DSP is to avoid this (I ran HD for 15 years previously), but I'd be interested to know if the HDX-Carbon combination has *worse* native tracking performance compared to a fully native system, or just the same.

Hope I've explained the question well enough !

Well there seems to confusion in terms .
First to clarify there is no "Carbon engine". Carbon is a hardware interface unit, that has 8 HDX DSP chips in the unit itself and uses the HDX Hybrid DSP (software)

So its unclear if you are thinking about getting the Carbon interface unit
Or thinking about getting an HDX card ?
Either of which can use the HDX hybrid software.
BUT the difference is with The Carbon unit your DSP mode is always in Hybrid, where you can run a mix of DSP enabled,,, and native only "tracks" in the same session..... BUT when you do have a track in DSP mode you cannot run Native only plugins on it..

With an HDX card and the new Hybrid software you can choose to run a session in either classic HDX DSP (where you can have both native only and DSP plugins on the same track) ,,,, or in HDX Hybrid DSP where you (can't have them run on the same track)

Having had HD Native card myself since Jan of 2011 and now having Carbon (unfortunately I had to sell my HD Native card and OMNI to fund the Carbon) so I am just going off memory.....

I can say that the ability to record in DSP mode I think/feel gives me a more "right there in the room analog" feeling to recording and overdubbing than I had with HDN ,,,, and frankly I do not miss Native only plugins.

But yes with either and HDX card in Hybrid mode or with the Carbon unit you can still set the buffers low and record in native ....

I don't have any measurements but since the Carbon unit connects to the computer via AVB ethernet ,,,in native mode I am guessing it will be some few amount of mili seconds slower, than a PCIe HDN card. Will you notice it ? ? I don't think I would, particularly if I set the buffer at 64

Hope this helps ........Kev