Robboman
Fractal Fanatic
Speculating is good sport. It's fun, I like it. Here's my guess.
It will be an Axe-PC / AxeFx-Lite hybrid. :idea
... (etc)
This 'countdown' hype is huge. Even Cliff said "it's big news, deserving of a countdown".
So I'm updating my previous guess. I now predict that in a few days we will see the announcement of a whole new line of Axe hardware. Multiple products. One will be similar to my previous guess, another will be the all-new high-end flagship Ultra killer. Possibly some products in-between. The current Standard and Ultra will be retired.
Here's my arguments why:
Cliff's passion is designing software (effects and modelling algorithms). This is what makes the Axe so great. Yet the business is all about selling boxes (to run the software).
Why NOT have new and better boxes to sell?
Cliff designed the original Axe hardware and assembled units himself in the early days because he was a one-man startup. Later he jobbed out assembly to an American CM. THEN he hooked up with Tom King/Atomic, who already had a relationship with a Chinese contract manufacturer. Eventually the long-promised MFC-101 came out. Guess what, it's 'Designed in America' (hence.. not 'made' in America). Just like the Atomic stuff.
What if Cliff could sell a new box with more features at a lower retail price while keeping or increasing his margin? This is easily achievable with Chinese CM. FAR less costly in quantity, no reason quality should suffer when built to Cliff's specs.
Axe-Lite and Axe-Floorboard are pretty obvious good ideas for new customers in the sub $1000 market, but it would also make sense to have a new Ultra. If it's more capable than the Ultra, many of us hardcore users will line up for it immediately. We're a pretty big market of extremely satisfied customers. Many of us have money to upgrade, we just need the product available.
BTW.. I predict USB and Axe-PC functionality will be built in to every new model. I believe the lack of USB is the real reason Axe-Edit is still beta. No matter how good Axe-Edit software is, it will always appear slow, buggy and laggy when controlling an Axe-Fx over the dog-slow 30-yr-old MIDI protocol. It's a perception problem, lots of people won't know it's MIDI's fault, they'll just wonder why their Line 6 editor is so smoking fast while Axe-Edit is so slow. USB fixes this, and I believe also makes an Axe-Fx VST plugin possible without threat of piracy (the VST core will only run on the Axe DSP and talk to the DAW over USB)