Avid @ AES NY

[Ben M]

Avid have said their making an exciting announcement on thursday at AES in NY. I wonder what's coming? New HD systems?

Do you care?

[The Tasmanian]

I can be sure of two things -
1 whatever it is it WILL be way too expensive and overpriced,
2 it will piss people off who bought their recent products


Although I hope i can upgrade my 002 to HD excel thunderbolt with 48 i/o for $200

[Ben M]

Someone tell em their dreamin'.


I'm growing increasingly uncomfortable with the way Avid and some other companies are releasing their products.

[Sammas]

Its the new AVID 003s.

There is a lot of apprehension associated with this announcement. People seem convinced that it is going to be a new TDM system to replace HD. Rumours of thunderbolt systems, or TDM systems that include the new RTAS2 plugins in a new more efficient fashion... FPGA based DSP systems that are fluid in scaling processing (al la Fairlight CC-1)... Protools 10!


You know, the same old hope and dreams. Only for Avid to drop the ball and release something mediocre.

...I bet this year it will be a new line of guitar hero instruments. Or a 003 with Thunderbolt.

[Drumstruck]

Speculation is rife about PT10 64bit...... and there are some trade-ins being offered on a new h/w piece.... both of these and thunderbolt support wouldn't go astray

[Mark Bassett]

http://callcenterinfo.tmcnet.com/news/2 ... 873494.htm

[Drumstruck]

hmmmmm •Use multiple file formats and mixed bit depths in the same project-including interleaved-without converting files

- 10K for the "full" HD system - not bad comparitively to the old pricing

- 1K for the upgrade.....

Any takers???

[Ben M]

Very disappointed. $1000 upgrade to PT10HD. WTF*!@$% And for what features?

Upgrade feels very posthouse driven. I don't know about you but clip gain control isn't something I'd find very handy. And I'd probably stuff around with it and waste time, and talk about sucking the dynamics out of music. But I'd say very handy for post houses.

I'm going to soak the info in a bit more... but this seems like they got the price wrong for the HD software upgrade.

[NathS101]

I reckon...
$1k to upgrade from HD9? no thanks.

[audioio]

HDX: 18 x 350 MHz processors (T1)
HD: 9 x 200 MHz processors (56k)

If 56k means the Motorola 56k chips, what's a T1? The FPGA that Nath referred to, or a SHARC?

[mylesgm]

so PTHD 10 will be the last PT to support original HD and accel systems and previous versions of PT will not open PT10 files unless saved in a legacy format. what a drag.

[adamcal]

A lot of the so called new features I have been using for years. just one example Clip Gain has been in nuendo from the start and is VERY handy in music recording.

Its funny seeing the videos with the famous engineers going on about how revolutionary clip gain and real time fades are, and how its going to save so much time and change their lives for the better, and how floating point mixer maths and headroom sound sooooooo much better now, so what was it crap before version 10?

Then I think back on the forum posts ive made over the years telling how much I love those features (among others PT only now finally has) and would sorely miss them if I had to use PT, then being shot down by the PT users saying how useless they are. Of course now its "amazing" "exciting" new features.

Same thing happened when they finally did ADC, while cubendo, logic and so on were already doing that for years. how anyone mixed without ADC with all the little track delays and nudge forward tricks is beyond me, but they did all the upto version 6 or 7.

[The Tasmanian]

i was right - at least I understand their predictable greedy motives
I'm going to bight my lip!

[mylesgm]

I hate advertising bs. I didn't buy HEAT but from what people were saying they couldn't mix without it and now its not even mentioned in PT10. I do like the workflow I have in PT, I know it well and it suits me. In fact if they never changed it and just modified it to work on the newer computers I would be happy. I couldn't give a toss about 'clip gain' (dont even know what it is) can't see how 64bit is going to save my productions, really cant see why I need 1000db headroom (yes thats in the blurb). Seriously cant understand peoples need for higher track counts either. I do large scale mix sessions (100+) on HD2 with a UADquad card and dont see what more I need that PT could provide and I certainly wont need 768tracks...who does? I'd rather spend money/time on developing skills and better outboard...

[Manning]

- 10K for the "full" HD system - not bad comparitively to the old pricing

"Starting from..." I took that to mean that the HD1 equivalent is 10K (could be wrong of course).

[JamesM]

HDX: 18 x 350 MHz processors (T1)
HD: 9 x 200 MHz processors (56k)

If 56k means the Motorola 56k chips, what's a T1? The FPGA that Nath referred to, or a SHARC?

The chips are these http://www.ti.com/product/tms320c6727b the 350 mhz x18 with a small pfga to run the mixer

Pretty boring stuff really!

[The Tasmanian]

I'll just run my HD system for as many years as humanly possible -and NEVER got to PT10.
And dump the format at the first chance I can.
Now there is a hole in the market that needs filling.
Like you Myles - why would I need all this bullshit? -
If I cant make a great album with what I have then what hope do I have?
Force redundancies will come back to bight them.

[Manning]

It is worthwhile at times to remember how many amazing albums were recorded on MixFarm systems.

[Sammas]

I don't get it guys. This new system is impressive! Perhaps it is just backlash at the price... or the fact that HD systems will ultimately become obsolete? ...we all knew that was going to happen eventually, didn't we? Look at mix ending at protools 6.4. Look at anything digital, in fact. It is like audio social stigma has put AVID in a position where they are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Protools 10 redefines the way DAW's utilize system resources. People have been complaining about the way HD excludes the power of native processing. With the ability to load audio into ram for playback, protools 10 lifts the bar higher for everyone. What a great feature! Particularly in what appears to be the computer age of cheap ram. Loading an entire session into ram puts protools WELL ahead in speed and efficiency over any other daw that I know of. It is a game changer.

I am really keen to try it! I've read countless comments that workflow has been improved quite substantially... which is impressive, because it was second to none in my books anyway.

[mylesgm]

I'll just run my HD system for as many years as humanly possible -and NEVER got to PT10.
And dump the format at the first chance I can. Like you Myles - why would I need all this bullshit? -
If I cant make a great album with what I have then what hope do I have?

I agree except for this PT10 files will not open on PT8/9 and if I do ditch 'tools which would probably be in a 3 years (computer lifespan) all of the PT stuff I have will be worthless and maybe that would be ok if I didn't look at it and go well these converters still convert and sound good etc. But if a client brings in some PT files from PT10 then I wont be able to open them. If I work at a studio with 10 and then come back to mix on 8/9 then I still be in the same boat. One of the best things about tools is that it is everywhere and I just grab my hard disk and away we go.

Force redundancies will come back to bight them.

Forced redundancies suck for more than one reason. One of them that shits me big time is the waste of primary resources. And the high value of those primary resources that just get tipped. I'm sure the power supplies are still good, the connectors, the rack case etc etc. Sadly it bites all of us and yet the corporations always escape...

Of course maybe this is the way it has always been but it used to be companies that paid for the upgrades etc not individual freelancers like you and me. The amount of times I've seen good (and expensive) gear just thrashed because it was not owned by the end user is uncountable and sad. Now that we pay for it ourselves we cry foul over the cost.

Like you Myles - why would I need all this bullshit? -
If I cant make a great album with what I have then what hope do I have?

I think your only hope will be to talk up how awesome you are on gearslutz and get a sponsorship deal...

[Ben M]

I agree except for this PT10 files will not open on PT8/9

I think you need to do a "save copy in" from the file menu then select your rates and PT session type.