Review: Avid HD Native Thunderbolt Interface
Thunderbolt may be the answer to Mac Pro woes, but the promise of Avid’s first thunderbolt interface is tempered by the inability to purchase it standalone. So who is it designed for?
17 October 2013
Review: Brent Heber
So ‘they’ say Apple will be discontinuing the Mac Pro line in 2013. It makes sense. Apple is making a stack more cash from the consumer iOS market than the pro space and apparently it costs quite a bit in R&D to make a Mac Pro as pretty as the ones they have done in the past. Not to mention the last three models of the Mac Pro have been nearly identical, so perhaps the writing is on the wall. For those of us in the pro audio space with our beloved PCIe expansion cards, where does that leave us? Thunderbolt connections are apparently our saviour, with ports connecting straight to the heart of the motherboard at whopping speeds hitherto unheard of. Moving forwards in the Apple space the Mac Mini Server and iMacs may be the most powerfully optioned OSX CPUs for audio work, so the thunderbolt connection and providing pro audio solutions for it is a high priority for many manufacturers, Avid among them. Affordable thunderbolt expansion chassis are already on the market as a migration strategy but natively-connected thunderbolt interfaces seem to be the next wave of pro audio kit.
That’s looking towards tomorrow, when the Mac Pro line is no longer an option. Today most audio facilities are still well equipped with relatively new Mac Pros and do not yet have to face any re-equipping into thunderbolt land. So who is the Avid HD Native Thunderbolt interface aimed at and what does it do?
The Avid HD Native Thunderbolt box can only be purchased as part of a system with an Omni interface and ProTools 10HD. As it stands, you can’t buy it standalone, which for a HD owner like myself is a hard pill to swallow. As a HD user, the ability to connect the interfaces I already own via thunderbolt is an appealing future-proofing measure. But in the same measure, connecting via the thunderbolt box without the PCIe cards would cut a lot of DSP out of the chain and a resultant drop in performance. Thinking through the options, if I wanted to rip a HD interface out of my rig and go portable with thunderbolt, while it would be one less step to just hookup through this new thunderbolt box, an expansion chassis might be the best power to weight ratio anwyay.
So it begs the question, who is it aimed at if not the stalwart HD user? If you’re already a Tools user, perhaps from the LE generation that has been using a USB or Firewire interface but looking for something with a little more grunt, then you’re probably a closer fit.
QUALITY NATIVELY THERE
The quality of a HD Native system is well spruiked. Whether you are using the thunderbolt box or its PCIe brother you end up with snappy low latency performance for tracking and can run twice as many ins and outs as a PTHD system without either box/card (64, up from 32 running Avid software alone). The new Avid interfaces are well regarded, have great clocking and sound extremely transparent. The Omni in particular is a great little box with many high end features crammed into a single rack unit and is one of the most usefully designed boxes Avid has ever made.
Realistically the HD Native thunderbolt should be thought of as a cable. It allows you to plug Avid interfaces into a laptop or iMac etc, it doesn’t add any processing power, it has a nice headphone output (that can only be used if the box is plugged into an Avid interface rendering it fairly pointless, and would make more sense if it was untethered) so basically it’s an adapter cable. Then why can’t it be bought standalone?
NEED TO KNOW
As a standalone product, the HD Native Thunderbolt could be useful in one industry in particular. By enabling more portable, smaller form factor computers for use with up to 64 channels of Avid I/O, you present a solid option for the live sound recording industry. A rack of interfaces, or better yet the new MADI I/O from Avid with one of these thunderbolt boxes would give simple and compact access to the raft of live boards with MADI connections straight into a laptop or Mac Mini Server. Take it a step further with the Avid Venue systems that are doing so well, the thunderbolt box/cable can connect straight to the Profile or Venue’s HD card slots giving 48 fixed and 16 assignable outputs from the console pre-processing, a big step up from the 18 available over firewire which most engineers have used on previous generation laptops. In a live environment it actually makes sense to have that high quality headphone output with high gain for checking what you are tracking.
DAISY BALL & CHAIN
It begs the question, why engineer the thunderbolt box to be so ‘dumbed down’? Why not add an Omni generation pre amp on the front, a pair of XLR/TRS combo outputs on the back and allow it to be used without HD I/O connected? Then you end up with a frankenstein MBox Mini that can also connect 64 channels of HD I/O to your laptop and that would be attractive to the travelling engineer. But in many ways, the issue of pre-existing HD interface owners not being able to buy the thunderbolt box stand-alone stems from precisely that fact — that Avid has made the thunderbolt box a modular piece, not built-in. If they had merely released an updated Omni with thunderbolt onboard, then there wouldn’t be a problem to have.
There’s also the issue of thunderbolt being a daisy chain system. This box only has one thunderbolt port, making it the end of the chain, which is inconvenient, and requires a hub.
So while on one hand it looks like an expensive, unnecessarily modular introduction into Pro Tools HD, you’ve got to realise that it’s never been cheap. Pro Tools HD has always existed as a premium product, built on qualified systems that are designed to function to a given spec. And while tempting to compare it on face value to the only other thunderbolt interface on the market, there are some major differences. While Universal Audio’s Apollo has 18 x 24 I/O, the Omni can accommodate 64 channels of I/O, and it also has a serial port connection for pro level sync, while Apollo trades off its very desirable onboard UAD-powered plug-in platform. So while the computer interface might be the same, the devices aren’t.
Also, if you are a travelling engineer, this box will ship with ProTools HD10 on an iLok (the most expensive software update Avid/Digidesign has ever offered, adding some more value to the equation) so it’s easy enough to work without the thunderbolt box at all, just using your laptop’s sound output and your headphones, something many of us have been doing since PT9 came along and opened up that option. Perhaps that would be preferable to having to plug the box in and potentially drain your batteries that much faster on a long flight.
For the existing market that Avid already dominate this seems a bit of an odd duck unless they decide to sell them without I/O and find a way to make that headphone jack work without an interface plugged in the back. But for the new startup, a Mac Mini Server and one of these thunderbolt boxes with an Omni would make a great system — low latency tracking, solid monitoring capability, great sound and oodles of native software grunt.
RESPONSES