Monitoring while recording with native plugins in HD

[YYR123]

Originally Posted by Barry Johns

Something I do is convert TDM plugins to RTAS when I've finished tracking. My final mixes don't have very many TDM plugins on them, except for Aux's which we all would expect.

why pray tell? B/C as Nerd states that what the DSP chips are for........Unless you are trying to take advantage of the native mixer having a higher floating point than the TDM counterpart. (iirc)

[Emcha_audio]

Originally Posted by nerd513

suit urself but there really is no reason to use a rtas plug in unless u dont have the TDM version or are running low on chips.

One of the reasons why some don't mix in TDM (HD) is that it's a well known fact that PT's native summing / mix engine sounded better than HD. That was due to PT 9 (and upward) summing and mix engine architecture being 64 bit double precision (not memory addressing here but the mixing bus) while TDM (HD) was at a 48 bit fixed point summing. While the RTAS plugins were also 32 bit floating processing vs the 24 bit fixed for TDM. All of that has resulted in people noticing a difference in the sound to the advantage of PT native. That was fixed with Pro tools HD Native and HDX.

An other reason is that some people also tracked in the studio then went into a mixing room freeing the tracking room for other people to do their tracking, while they mixed the albums in the mixing room.

There are probably more reasons too, but these would be the more common, well beside people running out of voices due to mismanagement of Rtas/TDM placements.

And apparently ninjawed by J>Daniels .. I should have refreshed before starting to post.

[YYR123]

Hahah - I would just add that the quote where you said

"the difference in the sound to the advantage of PT Native"

We should maintain the nomenclature of the time which would have been PT-Le

But by no means, your post was much more technically adept

[Emcha_audio]

Originally Posted by YYR123

Hahah - I would just add that the quote where you said

"the difference in the sound to the advantage of PT Native"

We should maintain the nomenclature of the time which would have been PT-Le

Hehe never thought about this, but it does make sense to take out the LE after admitting that the Native summing and processing engine were superior to HD's summing and processing engine.

[Barry Johns]

Originally Posted by nerd513

i have plenty of experience actually years of it. I have no idea why u would put strain on ur computer for no good reason though? why would u have HD3 if ur not gonna use the chips? thats what they are for

Can an HD3 do all the things you need it to without annoying work arounds?

Like I said, if you actually do read everything I said, is that I started this practice when I had an HD2, which could not handle all I needed to. Plus, me adding a hundred RTAS plugins to a mix, has very little impact on my computers performance, well the typical ones I use that are very low CPU draining plugins.

If you have so much experience, why not just give it a try, see for yourself. Don't trust me, just give it a try.

[nerd513]

u honestly think i havent used rtas in HD? I was forced to when i first got my system because i hadnt upgraded my waves to TDM and i had HD1 originally. I shortly realized i was gonna need more cards and to uprgrade my plug ins. Yes my system does everything I need and more. I wouldnt mind another card but that would involve a chassis. On occasion I will have to use rtas because i use all my chips. its not uncommon for me to use 20 auto tunes in a song and those babies eat chips like no other.

[WernerF]

Taking for granted that Native sounds better than TDM is an opinion, not a fact. It has been debated ad nauseum and has never been agreed upon. Personally I don't buy it and I'm not alone in this conclusion. If you apply proper gain structure there should be no difference in sound.

As far as using Native plugins it is totally situation specific but the latency for tracking is pretty darn noticable no matter what plugin you are tracking through. I have an HD 6 system and still have to use Native plugins for some of my needs, mainly because so darn many of the new plugins are Native only these days, but I would never track through them. At a 256 buffer setting even Slate VMR, which has almost zero delay, has a very noticable latency when playing through it when combined with a TDM version of Trim. The whole idea of tracking through Native on a DSP system is not really that workable.

[Drew Mazurek]

The fact that Avid joined everyone else in the 32bit float world when it unified the PT mixer with PT, PT Native, and HDX tells you even they knew it was better. Not much debate there.

[Emcha_audio]

Originally Posted by WernerF

Taking for granted that Native sounds better than TDM is an opinion, not a fact. It has been debated ad nauseum and has never been agreed upon. Personally I don't buy it and I'm not alone in this conclusion. If you apply proper gain structure there should be no difference in sound.

As far as using Native plugins it is totally situation specific but the latency for tracking is pretty darn noticable no matter what plugin you are tracking through. I have an HD 6 system and still have to use Native plugins for some of my needs, mainly because so darn many of the new plugins are Native only these days, but I would never track through them. At a 256 buffer setting even Slate VMR, which has almost zero delay, has a very noticable latency when playing through it when combined with a TDM version of Trim. The whole idea of tracking through Native on a DSP system is not really that workable.

For gain structure I agree, but for the summing buss, I don't. The summing buss of TDM is 48 bit fix, while for HDX, HDN and native it's 64 bit double precision, it's not just a question of gain staging here but how everything is being mashed together and summed with greater precision.

[Brandonx1]

Originally Posted by WernerF

Taking for granted that Native sounds better than TDM is an opinion, not a fact. It has been debated ad nauseum and has never been agreed upon. Personally I don't buy it and I'm not alone in this conclusion. If you apply proper gain structure there should be no difference in sound.

Actually, TDM has more resolution than 32 bit float if gain staged properly. I don't think it makes on lick of difference and sense you don't have to gain stage 32 bit float correctly at all. 32 bit float wins for me. If you really want to get down to the math, 32 bit float is inferior. Functionally it's way better.