Avid Pro Tools Carbon Audio Interface Is a Dead End

With competition in the studio recording and particularly in the music production market segments heating up while computer interfaces and network technologies continue to evolve at a fast pace, Avid finds itself increasingly in a hot spot. The industry standard Pro Tools software is facing aggressive competition from all directions, while Avid's hardware days are now long gone. The company needed to do something for the project/small studio market, which they are loosing fast, and so they launched Pro Tools Carbon, a new audio interface.

Mark of The Unicorn (MOTU) is an engineering-driven music technology company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which sometimes forgets to tell the world they exist. In fact, sometimes we even forget that MOTU makes one of the best DAW's in the world, called Digital Performer, which a lot more people should use. They also do excellent audio recording interfaces and now they introduced the M2 and M4, two compact units powered via USB-C. Hurray!

Mark of The Unicorn is shipping its new MOTU 112D digital audio interface, which features MADI, AES/EBU, Optical and AVB connectivity. Introduced at the NAMM 2015, the new MOTU 112D is a flexible Thunderbolt-equipped digital audio interface, router, format converter and mixer.

In July 2014, Mark of The Unicorn (MOTU) surprised the industry announcing a range of USB/Thunderbolt audio interfaces complemented with Audio Video Bridging (IEEE 802.1 AVB) network technology. Since AVB requires the use of dedicated (AVB-certified) routers and switchers, MOTU also announced its own AVB Switch. Now, MOTU reinforced the range with two new AVB 24-channel interfaces.

The new MOTU 1248, 8M and 16A audio interfaces provide Thunderbolt or high-speed USB 2.0 (compatible with USB 3.0), on-board DSP with mixing and effects, supporting a flexible 48-input digital mixer with dynamics modeled from British consoles. The new MOTU audio recording interfaces are also the first to use AVB audio networking for large multichannel configurations.