Profile Thunderbolt Recording

[JohnBruce]

Hey Guys,

Im new here but Ive toured with a Profile at FOH for years. I have a long tour this year and would like to employ PT at FOH. I want to multitrack the shows and employ virtual soundcheck every day. Im trying to come up with the easiest, smallest, and cost effective way to do this.

I realize the standard way to do this is a HDX card in the FOH rack of the Profile and Digilink cables to a computer that houses a PCI HDX card. I don't want to carry a mac tower around all year and the HDX cards are obviously pretty expensive.

My question is will this setup work and I apologize in advance if this is old news.

- A standard HDX card in the FOH rack at the Profile end
- Digilink cables with mini digilink adapters on the other end
- Connect to this thunderbolt interface (which cannot be sold separately of an 8x8 interface ?)
http://www.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=h...9QEwAQ&dur=366
- Thunderbolt connect to a 15 inch mac pro (maxed ram and HD speed)
- That interface comes with PT 10 HD as well with a 8x8 interface so this setup could be used standalone (without Profile)

Ive never seen people use this, does it give me 64 tracks or does thunderbolt limit me at 32 ? I realize HDX card in a tower handle the DSP but will that be an issue if I'm mixing on the Profile?

Thanks guys i hope this was clear enough to get some answers. Im also hoping to use this setup to potentially mix a live record on as well as use in a studio environment.

[Kenmillerjr]

Sounds okay to me. Since you are running PT 10 HD, you will not have the 32 channel limitation. However, as always I would recommend instead of recording to the system drive that you have an external drive to record to, no matter how fast your system drive is.

[Tigerspill]

Originally Posted by Kenmillerjr

However, as always I would recommend instead of recording to the system drive that you have an external drive to record to, no matter how fast your system drive is.

Even if it is ssd type on the MBPr?

[Brent Lind]

Yes, always best to keep audio and system on seperate drives. If external, you want to use a different bus than your interface - tho maybe TB can keep up, haven't spent much time with it yet. If internal, use two drives via Sata.

On a MacBook I would probably do an SSD for system and a large capacity HDD at 7200 rpm where the optical drive used to be, depending on your model that would give you a write speed of either 3 or 6 Gb/ps which is pretty rockin. SSD would probably be faster as the audio drive, but large capacities are still so expensive that I think having one of each is still a good compromise.

[digidesigner]

Originally Posted by JohnBruce

Hey Guys,

Im new here but Ive toured with a Profile at FOH for years. I have a long tour this year and would like to employ PT at FOH. I want to multitrack the shows and employ virtual soundcheck every day. Im trying to come up with the easiest, smallest, and cost effective way to do this.

I realize the standard way to do this is a HDX card in the FOH rack of the Profile and Digilink cables to a computer that houses a PCI HDX card. I don't want to carry a mac tower around all year and the HDX cards are obviously pretty expensive.

My question is will this setup work and I apologize in advance if this is old news.

- A standard HDX card in the FOH rack at the Profile end
- Digilink cables with mini digilink adapters on the other end
- Connect to this thunderbolt interface (which cannot be sold separately of an 8x8 interface ?)
http://www.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=h...9QEwAQ&dur=366
- Thunderbolt connect to a 15 inch mac pro (maxed ram and HD speed)
- That interface comes with PT 10 HD as well with a 8x8 interface so this setup could be used standalone (without Profile)

Ive never seen people use this, does it give me 64 tracks or does thunderbolt limit me at 32 ? I realize HDX card in a tower handle the DSP but will that be an issue if I'm mixing on the Profile?

Thanks guys i hope this was clear enough to get some answers. Im also hoping to use this setup to potentially mix a live record on as well as use in a studio environment.

Hi John,

I would advise you to use this terminology to avoid misunderstanding - HDx is the 64 channel I/O card for VENUE, HDX is the PCIe Pro Tools DSP card for tower computers.

Current owners of VENUE can order just the HD Native components too, it needs to be a special order and you need to contact your dealer for this to happen. This is available with or without Pro Tools HD software, one per desk, desk serial and name of the owner needs to be included with the order.

For standalone use you actually do not need an interface anymore, since PT will open and run on a laptop sound card too. With HD Native you will get 64 I/O, but you need to run PTHD software. Hint or a tip in this situation would be to *save as* the copy of session file right away, cause when you open a show in the hotel on a laptop and route all channels to a stereo pair if will be a real PITA to manually route them back to appropriate channels for Virtual Soundcheck after you have overwritten the original file

If you want and need DSP on card then you need to look at HDX card instead of HD Native. You can put an HDX card into a Magma Thunderbolt chassis if you like. DSP has no to little functionality at the typical show tracking situation, but can be helpful if you wish to do some serious mixing or tracking thru plugins and/or tracking thru Pro Tools. HDX can also be useful, in case you need to go beyond 64 track recording, like when you use two stage racks. In that case you need TWO HDX cards, both have 2 x 32 channel I/O ports giving you total of 128 channels of I/O. In this case you obviously need another HDx card at the VENUE side as well.

Hope this helps