Hey Shotgunn, have you tried another ASIO capable DAW just to try to narrow it down to PT or the AxeFXII? I'm probably one of the more vocal AVID bashers on the planet because of their business model and practices and having had to deal with them for 20 years now in my professional life. It was really hard for me to even install PT8LE on my own computer in order to use the 11R for a few months. It worked great, but that's how they do it....they get you sucked in so damn deep and in order to get EVERYTHING out of the application you have to use their products. Their philosophy is to make it so that you can't even consider another company's product and it has made them a ton of money and made them huge.
I will just add that after having used PT8LE for about 6 months that it's nothing special at all compared to any other reputable DAW out there. The only advantage is if you really go all AVID and then you can start taking advantage of hardware acceleration and processing, but with today's CPU's there's just no need for it. They all made their names back when CPU's were in the sub 200MHz range and you had to have dedictated hardware to do anything. It's not like that anymore, but people recognize the name and they have hung onto their business model for ever because its how they got where they are today.
Case in point about 90% of VST plugins can be converted to RTAS with a small program. But they made their own proprietary format for plugins because there's more money in it for them. I mean how many other DAW's work perfectly fine with VST? But it's not good enough for AVID?
I'm not saying to ditch PT, but if you expect them to REALLY go out of their way to create a platform for people to be able to use other vendors that is absolutely perfect you are probably going to end up disappointed and frustrated. Plus they move extremely slow in development....case in point the 11R has a million suggestions for improvements and there is nothing in the works and there has only been one firmware update since it was released several years ago. PT8LE had an upgrade path to PT9 and before they got all the bugs worked out they announced PT10...which cost you another limb. And from hanging around on the DUC forums it wasn't exactly well received and it's far from perfect. Who knows when they'll get it straightened out? Maybe after PT11 is released? Do they even have a 64-bit version out yet?
I'll also add that while many other companies have been using ASIO for their DAW's, AVID is very new to this. The chance that they got it down perfect from the start is pretty slim based on my experiences with them.
They've got their own agenda and they don't hide it nor apologize for it and the first person they answer to is their shareholders. So the motivation to undercut hardware sales is probably pretty low.
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