Avid Pro Tools | Carbon ™  From Avid

A NEW BREED OF AUDIO INTERFACE FOR MUSIC PRODUCTION

For artists, bands, and producers, Pro Tools | Carbon is a new breed of audio interface—built to capture brilliance. It’s a hybrid audio production system that features incredible sound quality and combines the power of your native CPU with onboard HDX DSP acceleration. So you can push your computer to the limit when you mix and record through AAX DSP plugins with near-zero latency monitoring. All at the touch of a button. All in Pro Tools.

Hardware and software.  Made for each other.

With intelligent Pro Tools integration, you’ll work smoothly all in one creative environment. The Hybrid Engine lets you offload real-time AAX DSP plugin processing to Carbon at will. This means you can record with a polished sound that brings out the best in your performance. No more third-party apps to slow you down. Just focus on the music you’re making—not what you’re making it with.

The best in both worlds.

The Hybrid Engine maximizes the performance of Pro Tools by using your native CPU and HDX DSP processing at the same time. When you put a track in DSP Mode, Carbon accelerates real-time AAX DSP plugins while your CPU plays back the rest of your mix. And because every AAX DSP plugin has a native counterpart, you can move seamlessly between worlds—just click a button. Record with HDX DSP power for near-zero latency monitoring. And work natively with the same plugins.

AAX. Architected to go beyond.

AAX is the only plugin architecture with true hybrid capability. It’s designed to deliver the same sound quality in both native and HDX DSP domains. Which means you can disconnect Carbon and take your mix on the road or collaborate with others who don’t have the interface.

Premium plugins included.

In addition to the 116 AAX plugins that come with Pro Tools—which include the Avid Complete Plugin Bundle, HEAT, and UVI Falcon—Carbon comes with a collection of premium plugins and sounds to get you started. Produce with virtual instruments from UVI and Native Instruments. Emulate mix environments with spatial audio processing from Embody. Dial in polished sounds with premium AAX DSP dynamics, EQs, and reverbs from McDSP, Arturia, and Plugin Alliance. And get 3 free months of Auto-Tune Unlimited. Then when you’re ready to take your sound further, there are thousands of AAX plugins and over 250 more AAX DSP available.

Epic performance.

With HDX DSP acceleration under the hood, Carbon is a powerhouse built on our industry-leading technologies. It’s finely tuned to process audio at blazing speed, so you can record with rock-solid sub-1 ms latency monitoring. Which means you’ll always hear yourself in perfect sync with the music as if you were playing live. 

The HDX Engine. Made to remove barriers.

At the heart of the interface is a custom-designed, high-performance FPGA and eight HDX DSPs. The FPGA routes audio lightning fast—one sample at a time—with virtually no latency. While the HDX DSPs handle real-time plugin processing, performing an amazing 22.4 billion operations per second. So no matter how big your session gets, or how many plugins you use in it, you can record with sub-1 ms latency. And it frees up your CPU cores for more virtual instruments and creative mixing.

Thermal design. Quietly cool.

A high-performance audio interface generates a lot of heat. That’s why we innovated a thermal design that quietly keeps Carbon cool—even when stacked with other gear in your rack. A single axial fan gently pushes air from the front of the interface to the back, modulating its speed to dissipate heat. Plus, it’s super quiet, so it can stay in the same room with you as you record.

Super sonics.

Every aspect of Carbon is engineered in pursuit of sonic excellence. Superior audio conversion. Double resolution clocking. And our most transparent preamp design ever. All details have been meticulously considered, so that Carbon captures every nuance with the greatest depth, dimension, and clarity. All you have to do is press record.

Converters. Clean and true.

The best sound quality begins with exceptional audio converters—we went the extra mile designing ours. With four ADCs per channel, Carbon has a remarkable 126 dB dynamic range. And from input, to the HDX DSPs, and into Pro Tools, the entire gain structure works at uniform 32-bit precision, providing more headroom without any signal degradation. The result? You’ll capture clean, natural sounding audio. Every time you record.

Mic preamps. Musical and transparent.

With a padless design, incredible 126 dB dynamic range, and support for 32-bit / 192 kHz audio conversion, Carbon features the most pristine preamps we’ve ever made. Capture performances without coloration. Bypass any preamp to use your own outboard gear. And with Variable Z built in, you can adjust input impedance to optimize or alter the tone of any microphone or instrument—from dynamic and ribbon mics, to guitar and bass.

Clocking. Twice as accurate.

Precision clocking is crucial for distortionless, artifact-free audio. That’s why we designed a double resolution implementation of the JetPLL™ jitter elimination technology. An FPGA-controlled oscillator runs at 100 MHz—twice as fast as typical JetPLL-based clocks. And it’s twice as accurate, with extraordinarily low jitter, ensuring high-fidelity capture and playback.

Connect the whole band.

With 25 x 34 simultaneous I/O, Carbon is ready to record any session–from solo artists to full bands. Eight pristine preamps, four headphone outputs, and 16 channels of ADAT I/O open up creative possibilities for miking, cue mixing, and expansion. Plus, with super-fast, high-bandwidth Ethernet connectivity, it preserves the highest possible quality from input to output.

The future is Ethernet.

Carbon connects to your computer over Ethernet. Based on AVB, our version of this high-bandwidth, low-latency connection streams audio to your host system at 32-bit float precision—the first in the industry. This means you have consistently high headroom and superior audio quality throughout the system. And it also primes Carbon for the future.