ProTool by Digidesign

For Information on Pro Tools please visit: Digidesign

DigiDesign Pro Tools LE Software is not Surround aware. It is shipped with the Digidesign's Digi 002, Digi 002 Rack, and Mbox sound interfaces but doen't support surround sound.

DigiDesign Pro Tools TDM systems are surround aware. These systems can be expensive but are used by many professional video and music production engineers.

The main thing about the TDM systems is they use PCI cards that are placed inside your computer. Each of the PCI cards have DSP (Digital Signal Processors) on them. These DSP chips are what do all of the audio processing and the computers PCI bus doesn't get overwhelmed with too much information. For instance the Pro Tools|HD Accel can handle upto 36 simultaneous audio tracks of multi-channel audio at 192 kHz sample rate. I don't know of any other digital system that can handle this.

Digidesign offers 3 different "Core Systems" that currently range from around $8000 to $14,000 or more per system. The Pro Tools|HD 1 has 32 channels of I/O and can support upto 96 tracks. All this without using your computer's PCI bus (very minimal load). This means that you can interact with the audio system without all the slow response or a weighted response that are found on "Native CPU" based computer surround systems. This system uses Pro Tool software that is surround aware.

The Pro Tools HD2 and HD3 systems are similar except that they can handle even more channels, 64 and 96. You can increase the number of tracks each system uses by adding additional HD Accel cards. The idea is that depending upon which core system you choose will limit the actual number of tracks/channels that your system can be expanded to.