Pro Tools | Carbon: Avid Unveils Next Generation Audio Interface Designed to Capture Exceptional Performances by Music Creators

Avid brings powerful HDX DSP technology to individual artists, bands and producers for the fastest, smoothest and most inspiring recording experience

BURLINGTON, Mass., November 12, 2020 – Avid® (Nasdaq: AVID) today announced the launch of Pro Tools | Carbon™, a new generation of audio interface that empowers artists, bands, engineers and producers to record every detail of every performance with the utmost clarity and precision. Built to capture brilliance, this hybrid audio production system features incredible sound quality and intelligent Pro Tools® integration that combines the power of the user’s native CPU with the unparalleled performance of HDX DSP acceleration. The result is the smoothest, most inspiring tracking experience Avid has ever designed.

Building on Avid’s heritage of making high-end studio technology more accessible to all music creators, Pro Tools | Carbon brings the power of its HDX technology to anyone who records and produces music.

Darrell Thorp, nine-time Grammy Award-winning engineer for such artists as the Foo Fighters, Radiohead and Beck, commented, “With onboard HDX DSP, Carbon puts low latency power at your fingertips. I can have AAX DSP8pluginson my tracking channels at the ready and access them whenever I want. I work extremely fast, so the fewer steps that I need to think about, the better. Carbon really speeds up the recording process. Plus, its transparent converter and preamp design sounds amazing.”

“With Pro Tools | Carbon, Avid brings groundbreaking, innovative tools and technologies like HDX DSP to a new generation of music creators around the globe to capture their best performances,” said Dana Ruzicka General Manager of Audio at Avid. “Pro Tools | Carbon is a complete project studio solution that has immense capability, without the complexities that bog down music creators. It has onboard HDX DSP which lets you record through effects in real-time, virtually eliminating latency, along with some of the highest quality I/O we’ve ever delivered to record a whole band and dial in individual low latency cue mixes for each player."
The all-new Pro Tools Hybrid Engine combines the power of native CPUs with onboard HDX DSP acceleration to maximize the performance of Pro Tools. It lets users push their CPUs to the limit when working with virtual instruments and mixing. It simultaneously allows users to access on-demand, low latency channels to record through AAX DSP plug-ins in real time – with sub-1 ms latency monitoring performance. With the ability to easily toggle a single DSP Mode button per track in Pro Tools, users have the flexibility to simplify their work flow for recording and mixing, so they can focus on the music they’re making—not what they’re making it with.

AAX DSP is at the core of the Hybrid Engine and is the only plugin architecture that offers true hybrid capabilities. AAX DSP is designed to deliver the same sound quality in both native and HDX DSP Acceleration domains, enabling users to toggle in and out of DSP Mode while maintaining equally exceptional sound quality. This also enables music creators to easily disconnect Carbon and take their mix on the road or collaborate with others who don’t have the interface.

Featuring pristine converters, double resolution clocking, and Avid’s most transparent mic preamp design yet, Pro Tools | Carbon has been meticulously designed so that with the push of the record button every nuance of every performance is captured with the greatest depth, dimension, and clarity.
Carbon is ready to record any session – from solo artists to full bands. With four headphone outputs to send individual monitor mixes, eight pristine preamps combined with 16 channels of ADAT inputs and an onboard talkback mic you are primed for tracking a band. Carbon also delivers a super-fast, high-bandwidth Ethernet connection to the host computer, that preserves the highest possible sound quality from input to output, as well as supporting future work flow enhancements.

In addition, Pro Tools 2020 introduces a new dramatic dark themed UI, that’s sleek, inspiring, and easier on the eyes—especially in lower light conditions. It also provides new ways to create and advance ideas with the ability to analyze audio and render it as MIDI notes. For audio post professionals, Pro Tools 2020 includes native integration to export ADM files for Dolby Atmos, a new space clips function that lets you arrange a multitude of clips in a fraction of the time, and it reintroduces the ability to bounce sessions to QuickTime formats in macOS Catalina.