Who has switched from TDM to HD Native?

I'd appreciate it if you shared your stories here. My biggest concern is tracking with plugs inserted or into an almost finished mix. Sorry if this has been discussed, I admit I didn't do a search.

I don't have a Native card sorry, but I can share a friend's experience who was a Logic user and now has Pro Tools 9. With Logic he was able to disable monitoring thru Logic and he used sound card direct monitoring instead. Now with Pro Tools 9 he cannot disable monitoring thru Pro Tools and for that reason also cannot use direct monitoring with the sound card. So he uses Pro Tools with smallest buffer and he said to me it is a problem for some customers. He would love to be able to disable Pro Tools monitoring and use sound card direct monitoring instead, like it was with Logic. I believe Native has a fast monitoring option for one mix, but when using that, plugins will be disabled AFAIK.

A friend mine in Nashville who is mainly just mixing, sold his HD rig and switched from TDM to Native and loves it. He has a good amount of grammys under his belt and does some big mixes, but he found a fast 8core mac and the rtas versions of his plugs still allow him to do large mixes. We were hanging at NAMM this last weekend and the only non native DSP he was interested in getting was the new UA2 firewire dsp box, but not for the dsp, just for the plugs they offer.

I decided to try out PT9 hardware-free, right when it came out. I haven't reinstalled my cards yet! I find it smooth and in no way hobbled. The only thing I miss is input monitoring, it has required me to work a little differently while tuning vocals. That said, I pretty much only do editing, not tracking or mixing. I think mixing would be fine in this way, tracking not so much.

Does HD native not offer input monitoring?

HD Native does in fact have input monitoring. I think Captain Crunch was referring to "regular" Protools Native.

i would like to know how big is the latency for input monitoring compared to a tdm system is. when using f.e. the pitch plugin in an aux in for recording processed how big is then the latency with the native card ?