I guess it's official: Avid Marketing discarded a well founded tradition of selecting a new and distinctive name for each platform and picked the most confusing, well, tag really — DX.
Yep, all that brain-storming, new thinking fully engaged, all the market research, audience testing resulted in just two letters. The first one is 'D', the second one is 'X'. And I don't have to remind you of all the possible associations with the letter 'X'. I hope this platform doesn't become known as The Marked One.
Let this be no reflection on the hardware itself, however. I am certainly glad they dumped the FireWire altogether as the primary bottleneck. And, from description of it, Avid engineers finally figured out how to utilize more than one processor. These are all positive developments, backed up by almost a year of testing and double-testing. Support for 64-bit Windows XP is notably absent, but hey we've all just been waiting for an excuse to get into Vista, right?
But let's get back to the unpronounceable. There already was the Nitris platform. It consisted, and still does, of two boards and a breakout box. First it was used by Avid or, for a purist in you, Softimage for their DS. Later it was adopted for Avid Symphony. That's when they started calling it Avid Symphony Nitris. Now we are all expected to articulate Avid Symphony Nitris DX and we'd better enunciate every sound to navigate safely between Nitris DS and Symphony Nitris.
Somehow the idea that people tend to abbreviate to the absolute minimum escaped Avid Marketing, somehow nobody woke up and said "Wait, isn't it too close to DS"? Quite possible that DX was a development name and nobody bothered to give it a once-over. Too bad. We are stack with a tongue-twister for the next who knows how many years.
