The Pro Tools Carbon is Julian Rodgers’ Hardware Product Of 2020, he explains why.

There are a few contenders for my hardware product of 2020 so I’m going to start with some honourable mentions. The product which has affected my working life more than any other is my Sit/Stand Desk. I’m healthier, more energetic for having it. The Heritage Audio HA609A Diode Bridge compressor made me pause and think about my decade long retreat from hardware outboard and the Austrian Audio OC818 convinced me that purely analogue microphones can be original and innovative. New mics don’t have to stand in the shadow of decades old designs.

Pro Tools Carbon

Deserving as they are I’m going to pass on all of these and choose the Pro Tools Carbon. It’s easy to criticise Avid but it’s also important to give credit for a right move and Carbon is a product they have needed to make for a long time.

Back in 2014, I was at an Avid event where they showed the, then new, S3L live sound system. Everyone was poring over the S3, not yet available as a standalone Pro Tools controller and asking about the possibility of having just that part of the system for use with Pro Tools. I was alone in looking at the accompanying “brain” of the system, the E3. This was a very attractive looking 2U box, which as far as I could see was a very sturdy rackmount PC with an integrated HDX card, AVB connectivity, and local and ancillary IO. This was at a time when Apple was dropping support for PCI cards with the introduction of the 2013 “Trashcan” Mac and I just thought it was a solution to a real problem people were facing but it was only available as part of an expensive live sound package. If they repurposed it to the studio market it would make an interesting proposition.

What has arrived with Carbon is exactly what I was looking for. AVB - check, HDX DSP - check, Local IO - check, Ancillary IO - over ADAT rather than AVB but check. If you’re working in stereo, tracking bands, it’s exactly what’s needed and as I’ve said before of Avid, they sometimes take a long time to release the product or feature you’re waiting for but when they do, they think it through.

4 independent headphone outs and a footswitch controllable talkback mic are great examples of features, which aren’t photogenic or glamorous but are exactly the kind of thing, which will make your session run better. A good headphone mix, near-zero latency and stress-free communication will do more for your recording than any converter or preamp ever will.

Carbon has excited me to the possibility of tracking a group of musicians all at the same time and capturing a proper performance in exactly the same way as when I bought my Digi001 back in 1999. If only 2020 had been a better year for getting a group of musicians, or anyone else for that matter, together in a small, poorly ventilated space for hours at a time… Maybe in 2021?