To see whether HD Native really offers seamless transfer from conventional HD, I opened up my Mac Pro, removed my HD2 cards and put in the HD Native card, which is a half‑length PCI‑e card. HD Native is also compatible with Icon, C24, Euphonix and Command 8 control surfaces, as well as the Venue Live Sound systems. For truly portable use with a laptop, an external PCI‑e chassis such as the third‑party Magma is required to house the Native PCI‑e card. Pro Tools HD Native can run on Snow Leopard‑equipped Macs and Windows 7 PCs, with a minimum of 4GB RAM. Only the few TDM‑only plug‑ins on the market, and Avid's new HEAT Pro Tools HD process, are not available for PT HD Native.
Unlike Pro Tools LE or the basic native Pro Tools 9, Pro Tools HD Native is claimed to offer "perfect round‑tripping” with DSP‑based HD systems, accommodating full Session compatibility, including transfer from TDM to RTAS plug‑in versions.
The card also includes Core Audio and ASIO drivers that support the full I/O count on the card, so it can be used as the interface with rival software such as Apple's Logic and Steinberg's Nuendo for full 64‑channel I/O. The HD Native card is designed to offer low‑latency performance comparable to a conventional HD system, and there is an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) running the mixer for the I/O on the card itself, which lets Avid do some low‑latency monitoring tricks. Rather, it's a card that allows you to employ HD interfaces to gain up to 64 channels of audio I/O, and enjoy some of the key advantages of the HD system, at a lower price than full HD. What it isn't, despite the name, is a means of using Pro Tools HD software with third‑party audio hardware. Of all the products that Avid launched in 2010, the Pro Tools HD Native card has perhaps been the most misunderstood. The idea of a 'native' Pro Tools HD might sound like an contradiction, but it offers the most affordable way of obtaining key HD features that are still not available elsewhere.