[KT Productions]

Thanks guys for all of your replies. I often dread posting on forums because of all the negativity I generally have to weed through to find the good stuff, but this has been a constructive experience....so cheers to that!

The HDX and the Native both have a gate array chip on board that is supposed to handle the mix bus (on HDX this is in addition to the DSP chips). Go anywhere that sells it (Sweetwater etc.) and you will find the following quote mere inches from the "Add to Cart" button:

"What's more, there's a separate FPGA processor for your mix bus, so all of your HDX card's DSP power is dedicated to running plug-ins."

There is actually a screen cap attached to my 1st our 2nd post showing that this is a lie.

What I take from my small amount of real life use (and I think Mixchump also helped validate this in his reply) is that it all goes out the window when using separate outputs. Mixchump's setup is a hybrid DSP \ Native solution allowing him to take advantage of the low latency monitoring HDX has to offer during tracking, but for me, I hoped to improve (not destroy) the monitoring of things like virtual instruments when recording, since any physical inputs (whether analog or digital) I would be monitoring at the console with no latency any ways.

You can't get blood from a stone, as they say, so in a sense I suppose I'm just venting my frustration. I've just been racking my brain as to whether or not to order a 2nd HDX or abort mission. I suppose comfort reverb \ delay for vocal talent would be the one real benefit, but I had been handling that a number of different ways prior to HDX any ways. HD Native PCIe cards are definitely available 2nd hand, I just worry about Avid pulling the rug out from under our feet on that particular product (after all, they had motivation of some kind to stop making it in the first place). Also.....voice packs? Really? LMAO. Absolute gangsters.