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CalDigit's New Thunderbolt 4 Dock for MacBook Pro Features 18 Ports
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To be honest? There's a "not tiny" number of people working with music creation/production who are essentially stuck in this category. Sure, the big time "stars" have the bucks to keep buying the very latest -- tossing out whatever they bought earlier that's become unsupported.
But to give just a few of my own examples? I have a Line 6 POD Pro XT rack-mount f/x processor. It probably does date back to around 2002-04 but you'll find very recent videos on YouTube from artists talking about how great these boxes were, even by today's standards. There's a free downloadable library of custom guitar sound patches for them on the Line 6 web site, full of thousands of great ones. Unfortunately, Line 6 hasn't bothered to update their patch manager software in years -- so you either need an older Mac with an OS X version that still runs 32-bit apps, or you need to communicate with the POD via Windows 7 in a VM. Again, that limits you to a Mac with an Intel processor.)
I also have a Focusrite Saffire Pro 14 which uses Firewire. I paid extra, many years ago, to buy that Firewire-based box instead of one of many USB connected digital recording boxes on the market. (At the time, that made sense because Firewire was faster and more CPU efficient than maxxing out the bandwidth of USB 2.0 with one of the other units.) It still works well with Apple's USB-C to Firewire adapter and I really don't want to pay hundreds of dollars to replace it with another box with essentially identical jacks and functionality except USB-based to work with the latest Macs. Again though? Focusrite has moved on now and declared no more software support for the Saffires for these M1 series Macs.
That leaves a lot of us hanging onto older Macs to dedicate to the music recording process.
Happy to see they added a headphone audio port to the back. I currently have my speakers plugged into the headphone jack port of the front of my TS3 Plus and it looks weird.
Find me a type-C equivalent to my $30 7 port (+3 power) USB 3 A hub that doesn't entail paying 10x as much for something that will provide no performance improvement whatsoever when used with the collection of USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 devices that I still need to connect (some bought in the last year). Then I'll think about getting USB-C cables for all my USB A devices.
USB 4/Thunderbolt is great for high end devices, but for a vast swathe of current peripherals (like any mechanical hard drive, and most affordable SSDs - we're still a long way away from the day when even basic SSD is cheap enough for backups and archiving, let alone the sort of high-end NVME that can actually exceed USB 3.0 speeds) the only "benefit" of USB-C over A is the exciting opportunity to buy new cables or adapters for all your perfectly good USB-A devices.
I have no experience with this brand. That said, we have tested quite a few at work with our new 14 and 16inch Macbooks and the results are less than good.
Lot's of odd problems overall. The current one I use at work (not there at the moment) blacks out my video on my LG 4K monitor at least once a day for 30-60 seconds. It always comes back but if I run HDMI directly to my Macbook that never happens. Audio is hit or miss with my desk speakers and my USB-A Logitech mouse (small USB-A receiver) will get very laggy on screen until I reboot my 16inch Macbook.
We have yet to find a USB-C dock that does it all and does it all without issues. I think the bigger share of the blame probably goes more to Apple, the new M1 series of chips/chipsets and/or Monterey and its host of bugs. After all it is that hardware that limits the number of monitors and does not support EGPU's either.
I am kind of missing my 16inch Intel Macbook to be honest.
Lot's of odd problems overall. The current one I use at work (not there at the moment) blacks out my video on my LG 4K monitor at least once a day for 30-60 seconds. It always comes back but if I run HDMI directly to my Macbook that never happens. Audio is hit or miss with my desk speakers and my USB-A Logitech mouse (small USB-A receiver) will get very laggy on screen until I reboot my 16inch Macbook.
We have yet to find a USB-C dock that does it all and does it all without issues. I think the bigger share of the blame probably goes more to Apple, the new M1 series of chips/chipsets and/or Monterey and its host of bugs. After all it is that hardware that limits the number of monitors and does not support EGPU's either.
I am kind of missing my 16inch Intel Macbook to be honest.
This looks great, really love the dual audio out, one of the major things that annoyed me about my current TS3+ is there is no rear audio out and I like living the single-cable life when hooking up my laptop. Currently I use a USB soundcard for audio-out on the back. Hopefully the DisplayPort works better too, I have always had issues with my monitors not working out of this dock DispalyPort to DisplayPort but they work with DisplayPort to HDMI.
I can tell you I would be very cautious about buying another Caldigit Thunderbolt dock.
My TS3+ has given me the following issues:
* The dock will still feed power and some signal to all plugged in devices even if the host computer is powered off. This is a pretty big deal for spinning HDDs
* This thing picks up every bit of cellphone interference!
* Audio in is very static-y and weak
* It can get quite warm, not really a downside but I know some people can get miffed about that
It's reasonable that they would still have USB-A. Think about customers that will complain about not having USB-A, versus how many people want the ports to be USB-C only. I would bet there are far more people in the former category than the latter. And for data-only USB which is what the non-Thunderbolt ports on this are, as long as they're gen 2, the speeds are the same between C and A. So people will largely either not care it's not type-C only, or they will be bothered if it's type-C only and want it to be type-A.
It's different than Firewire because the FW protocol itself is outdated and largely gone from consumer devices, but USB is still the same protocol as always, and this one supports 10 Gbits on all USB ports so it's no downgrade to be type-A. It'd be nice if there were more Thunderbolt ports but on hub mode you're limited to 3 Thunderbolt hub ports (you connect up to 6 Thunderbolt devices through daisy chaining combined with the hub capability, but only up to 6 in total).
We use nothing but Dell Ultrasharps in the office. They all run on DP (with other connector options as well).
I'm not an expert in chipsets and such, but based on the fact that they mention that utilizing the 2.5G ethernet bandwidth requires a Thunderbolt connection, I'm hopeful that it is indeed PCI.
No, it's a complete misunderstanding of what these products are for.
Will it let me connect two 4k LG850 to my MB Pro 16" ?
I have a TS3+ but it does not supply enough power to sustain the battery.
I have a TS3+ but it does not supply enough power to sustain the battery.
That’s why I prefer this 18 port beauty, and it was only $229. Fantastic.
HyperDrive GEN2 18-Port USB-C Docking Station
HyperDrive GEN2 is the next generation of USB-C Hub with 2X the speed and power of current 1st generation hubs. 2X video refresh rate (4K60Hz vs 4K30Hz), 2X USB speed (10Gbps vs 5Gbps), 3X memory card transfer speed (300MB/s vs 104MB/s) and 2X power delivery (100W vs 50W).
In all fairness it does have Display Port which is more capable than HDMI. Rather than buying a dongle you could just get an HDMI to DP cable, which are the same price as HDMI-HDMI cables. Or a TB to HDMI cable. And the cables are probably cheaper than a dongle, LOL.
...but the reality is that even most new midrange audio interfaces that advertise USB-C are just using the same USB 3.1g1 protocol - if not plain old USB 2 - as you got with plain old USB 3 (3.1g1 is, for most purposes, the same as 3.0 and even the 10Gbps USB 3.1g2 version doesn't need USB-C - plenty of PCs support it over type A). Even with "Thunderbolt 3 compatible" devices you need to read the small print because sometimes it just means "works with USB 3 via a Thunderbolt port". Yes, there are some high-end devices that actually use Thunderbolt (to support lots of channels or maybe better latency) but those go for 'serious callers only' prices.
Plenty of brand new audio equipment, synths etc. still uses USB 2 or 3 - because it is good enough whereas Thunderbolt/USB 4 is more expensive to implement.
Bottom line: 96000k (samples/sec) mono audio at 24 bits = 2.304 Mbps, USB 2 speed = 480Mbps - so even USB 2 has more than enough bandwidth for a multi-channel audio interface, you're not even remotely close to 'maxxing it out' with audio interface (I'm happily running an 8-out, 4-in interface over USB 2). Firewire was a huge step forward when it was Firewire 400 up against 4.8 Mbps USB 1.0 but was already into diminishing returns when it was FW800 vs USB 2, and the CPU overhead may have been an issue when CPUs were a fraction of the power of modern ones...
Thing is, technology may have gotten better, but human hearing still tops out at about 20 kHz (= 40k sample rate).
By the way you describe it it appears that the CalDigit dock is incompatible with the
- Mac
- macOS
- Mac app
- I/O
