Digidesign improves HD system - AES News - HD Accel PCI card - Brief Article

Post, Oct, 2003

DALY CITY, CA -- Digidesign (www.digidesign.com) is showing a number of new products at this year's AES show. The company's HD system is being enhanced with the new HD Accel PCI card, which increases performance as well as provides access to new Accel-optimized plug-ins and features.

An HD Accel card offers almost twice the processing muscle of the existing HD Process cards and nearly four times the performance of Mix Farm cards. It also exclusively supports the next generation of plug-ins, including Digidesign's new Impact mix bus compressor TDM plug-in. Using the HD Accel card results in 50 percent higher voice counts across all sample rates (44. 1 kHz to 192 kHz).

Pro Tools|HD 2 Accel ($10,995) and HD 3 Accel ($13,995) systems feature the HD Core card and one or two HD Accel cards respectively. Existing HD-compatible plug-ins are fully supported.

Digidesign will also be showing V. 6.2 of its TDM software, which now ships with all Pro Tools|HD systems, It is the first release to support the new HD Accel cards and combines the V.6.1 feature set with support for the new 96i I/O interface and import and export support for Microsoft's Windows Media Audio 9 format. Pro Tools TDM 6.2 offers cross platform session compatibility with systems running Pro Tools TDM/LE 5.1 software or higher, and supports all older Pro Tools sessions. The HD Accel systems include the latest HDpack plug-in bundle for free. The HD 3 Accell system includes more free TDM plug-ins, including Focusrite d2/d3, Line 6 Amp Farm, Sony Oxford EQ, Wave Mechanics Speed and Digidesign's new Impact plug-in.