Phil emptiness.be
Inspired
I'd expect them to go the stompbox route.
Here's my reasoning.
The rackmount unit has been done, and the Axe 2 fulfills those possible needs for guitarists. An outboard processing unit like the TC Electronic Powecore is hampered by the fact that Cliff seems to be more guitar oriented, and let's face it, you need to write code for VST, AU, and AAX plugin formats. Avid tend to change things at the drop of a hat without backwards compatibility, and Logic is due a major overhaul, so writing for either AAX or AU formats is dodgy.
As for guitars, a fully floor mounted unit would eat into MFC101 territory, even in stripped down format, and the powered monitor route is being handled nicely by Matrix, Atomic, et al.
The only viable guitar oriented route I see is to have small digital programmable stompboxes with multiple firmware options, that can be reprogrammed according to need. If you have four of these units, you can have a distortion, a compressor, a delay and reverb, or any combination of any effect type in stripped out format, which can be run before an amp to satisfy the tube only guys, and eat into that market share. They could possibly also act as extra DSP for the Axe itself through USB or RJ45 connection.
Or I could be dreaming......
I agree with you, I was thinking a similar. Or one stompbox in which you load whatever amp or effect you want via software. (input, output, usb. done)
You can just buy one pedal at a time, program a killer sound on your computer, throw it in the pedal, super transportable..
And then maybe they could do the "metal sounds" amps set as a soft you can buy, or if you only need "classic amps" you can buy that soft.
It would be interesting in a marketing way, you can buy one pedal, but some will get addicted and buy more! And it could create another community inside the fractal audio community.
I think many people don't need all that is in the axe fx and would be happy with that as it could be cheap enough, but expandable.
