Community member James Richmond is a freelance producer/engineer/audio consultant working from his studio in Oxfordshire, UK. He has chosen to go for a new 2019 Mac Pro even though it isn’t approved yet for Pro Tools. In this article, he shares his experiences setting up a 2019 Mac Pro with Logic Pro X and Pro Tools 2019.12 running on macOS Catalina with an Avid Pro Tools HDX1 system.

Over to you James…

Mac OS Catalina Support is here for Pro Tools with the exception of the new Mac Pro, which is a pity because that is the machine I see sitting before me. Yes, I actually bought one, which was a surprise to me as much as anyone (although not to my long-suffering and extremely wonderful wife). I bought the new Mac Pro somewhat under duress. There isn’t a machine that works for me as much as a Mac tower, and as we all know Apple hasn’t made a proper tower since 2012.

Why duress then?

The price.

It is just a lot of money for a computer for me, a one-man-band producer/engineer/audio consultant.

Mac Addict? A Bit Of Personal History

I’ve had Mac towers since the G4 days. Then a G5, then a couple of Mac Pro’s- running TDM/HD/HDX systems for the most part as well as native systems. I’ve had a happy marriage with Apple and Pro Tools for many years. Not without a few bumps in the road but, on the whole, a positive experience.

When my 2010 Mac Pro died a few years ago I considered buying another identical machine on the used market but wanted to get something more modern with Thunderbolt. I bought a 2017 iMac 5k 27” as a bit of a test. The iMac is a fine machine in itself but in a professional recording studio, I tend to prefer to have anything, that has a fan in it, as far away from my ears as possible. Of course, you could put the iMac in a machine room but then you are paying for a large screen you cannot use.

The iMac also saw me end up with a mess of dongles and using an expansion chassis for the HDX card. I didn’t hate it and yes it all worked, but it felt clunky and messy compared to a nice neat tower with ‘all the stuff inside it’. I also found that the iMac’s fans would spin up at inopportune times, not often but when they did it was annoying and I always had a nagging sense that a tower is just the proper machine for a studio, not an “all in one” like the iMac. A tower can be placed in the machine room. I’d argue that is its natural environment, or at least, out of the way and away from my ears.

The iMac lasted for me until 2018 when I bought a Mac mini. It too is a great machine for the money but I was still in a mess of Apple dongles with an expansion chassis. It did mean that I could position the Mac mini away from the mix position, which was great. But I found myself asking the question “Why can they not just make a proper tower computer for all the stuff to go in?”

A New Toy

When the new Mac Pro 2019 was announced I thought long and hard about going for a PC workstation. I work in Logic and Pro Tools and didn’t want to give up working in Logic unless I absolutely had to, so the day the Mac Pro was released I looked at the different specs and plunked down the cash for a 3.2GHz 16 Core machine with a 4TB SSD and base video and RAM. The order went in to with Apple with a date of delivery of around early January, but bless them they managed to get it to me a whole lot earlier than that, just 9 days after it was ordered and that included it getting lost in the delivery system once.

Yes, it was expensive- around £8,900 all up. Unboxing was an excellent experience - the box is super heavy-duty, the two sections are held together with velcro fabric, definitely a box to hold onto if you have space, should you ever need to transport it anywhere.

The new chassis is a work of art and design. The machine is effectively silent in a recording studio environment. If you put your ear right up against it you can hear the fan very slightly - from 1-2 metres away it is dead silent. You could definitely have this machine in your control room and still track vocals with a condenser microphone.

Since taking delivery of the Mac Pro, the memory has been upgraded via OWC/Mac Sales (much cheaper than Apple) with an extra 128GB for a total of 160GB (and I still have 4 RAM slots free.)

I’ve also bought a couple of PCIe sleds for a 1TB NVME and a 2TB SSD, so I have a total of 7TB of storage internally.

Installing Pro Tools

As I have mentioned already, Avid has released Pro Tools 2019.12, which provides support ‘with restrictions’ for Mac OS 10.5 ‘Catalina’ but without support for the 2019 Mac Pro, for which support is still listed as ‘coming soon’.

I’m normally not a ‘bleeding edge’ type. For example, I only recently moved my main production machine to Mac OS Mojave and in order to keep compatibility. I tend to be several macOS iterations behind many of my peers. Despite this I decided to install Pro Tools anyway.

Logic, of course, is supported with the current version of Catalina, which meant in the event of Pro Tools not working I’d be able to continue to do some audio work on the new machine. I decided to start with the Pro Tools software only, directly downloading the installer from Avid’s website.

To my surprise, it installed without issue and I was able to open the application up and load a few of my sessions that use the stock plugins. I pressed play and turn up my monitor controller and… NOTHING. A few seconds of thinking and a look at my studio monitors. In my haste, I’d not turned them on. IDIOT!

Turning on the monitors and then pressing play again and I’m hearing my music through Pro Tools on the new machine. It works!

HDXcellent?

Feeling confident I decided to look to my HDX card. Would that work, I wonder? The Avid HDX card currently ships with the necessary auxiliary power cables for Mac and PC but not the new Mac Pro, which uses a different connector type on the logic board.

Fortunately, a cable kit exists for the new Mac Pro, made by Belkin under the name of ‘Belkin AUX Power Cable Kit for Mac Pro’. It is not a cheap cable kit at £59.95, especially considering I only need the ‘6-pin to 6- pin power cable’ that takes the larger 6 pin connection from the Avid cable down to a size that is on the Mac Pro’s logic board.

A day later (Apple are fast with their shipping) the cable kit turned up and with a degree of trepidation, I inserted the HDX card into the Mac Pro and connected the Belkin cable to the motherboard and to the Avid HDX cable and the Avid cable to the HDX card. I then put the casing back on the Mac Pro, connected all the necessary external cables and powered the machine on.

A small part of me expected to see plumes of smoke erupt from the machine but there was no need to worry. I heard the HDX card fan spin up and then go silent and the machine quickly booted into macOS Catalina.

Next, I installed the HD driver and rebooted and then ran the Avid Digitest application to see if the card would be recognised by the computer, which it was. I then opened Pro Tools 2019.12 and changed the playback engine to HDX and loaded a session. This also worked! I need not have worried. Opening the System Usage window in Pro Tools shows 32 CPU threads and all the DSP available with the HDX card.

When I first ordered the 2019 Mac Pro, my assumption was that it would be several weeks or months before I’d be able to use it for actual music work due to macOS Catalina and the number of plugins and applications that are not yet compatible. That isn’t really the case. Despite not being yet supported by Avid I am already working on on the 2019 Mac Pro as my main system. I’ve had a few days now and it has been very stable. I had one crash instantiating a plugin but otherwise, I’ve had no issues and no problems. The new machine has so much power, more than anything I’ve ever owned and having the low latency of HDX combined with this really is a best-case scenario for me.

Is It Perfect?

I’ve had very few problems with the new machine. One issue I have noticed, whilst running some benchmarking sessions in Logic and Pro Tools. It seems that the 16 core Xeon processor doesn’t turbo boost under high CPU load as much as I thought it might. Intel’s Power Gadget app is a useful benchmarking application and the screenshot below shows power/CPU frequency/temperature and core utilisation of the computer during the playback of a Pro Tools session designed to fully utilise the native processing of the CPU. The Xeon processor is not turbo-boosting beyond 3.4GHz when in theory it could be capable of boosting to 4.4GHz. I am not sure if this is something that could be addressed with a future OS or DAW tweak or if it simply a function of this generation of Xeon processors, or perhaps an inevitable compromise between power and temperature/heat within the machine.

Certainly, I wouldn’t want the fans to spin up more than they are and generate more acoustic noise. I’m also aware that there is so much power in the current system that I’d be hard-pressed to fully utilise the native processing at this point in time. Other than this small technical point my ownership of the new Mac Pro has been overwhelmingly positive.

I am so happy Apple is making a proper workstation tower again and proud to own this machine. I look forward to making and recording a lot of music with it over the next 5-7 years. I do wish it had a few more USB Type-A ports but a rack-mounted USB hub has sorted that particular issue out for me.

I’d like to thank Theo Mandylas for his assistance in understanding the CPU benchmarking process as part of writing this review.

Finally, it goes without saying that I took a bit of a chance, installing an HDX card in a new, unsupported machine and the process I undertook is not currently endorsed by AVID. Anyone following my installation process does this entirely at their own risk.

More About James Richmond

To more properly introduce myself I’m a producer/engineer based near Oxford. I’m a former SSL tech support staffer as well as having written for a lot of Australian Pro Audio magazines (Next Music, Australian Guitar, Australian Digital magazine). I was the technical editor for Next Music (a sort of Aussie Sound on Sound/Future Music style magazine). Previously I was an IT networking consultant. My studio is based around Dante and Pro Tools HDX- with some nice monitors (Kii Three, ATC SCM45a’s) and a 48 channel Focusrite Red/Rednet rig with a load of analogue outboard.