I agree that Avid doesn't seem at all interested in that portion of the hardware market any longer. I guess the success of Pro-Tools might have something to do with that.
I agree. They seemed to have lost interest in the "Prosumer" market with respect to hardware. It was really a shame because they could have taken this much, much further. Same with the M-Box and M-Box Pro. But there are now a multitude of low cost, high quality interfaces.
Couple that with what I would consider the knuckleheaded marketing of pairing the 11r with Pro Tools for most of it's active product life and I see why they don't support it. One only had to look at the secondary market for them to get that. I don't know how many ads I saw from people who bought the ProTools/11r package just so they could get ProTools and recoup some of their cost by selling the Eleven Rack.
Can't argue that. But Digidesign even before they were bought by Avid, was "giving away" Pro Tools with hardware. That's how I wound up with like 4 perpetual licenses of Pro Tools. I'd get another license every time I bought an interface. At that point, you could only run Pro Tools if you had Digidesign or Avid hardware, (or M-Audio which was part of Digidesign at that time but you also needed an iLok and you got Pro Tools M-Powered. M-Audio and AIR was sold to In Music and the 11R tech was licensed by them.) Once Pro Tools was decoupled from Avid hardware, in version 9, people would but 11R either for the software and sell 11R to recoup their cost, or sell the software for the same reason. It was really against Avid's EULA but they never pursued it.
As far as the tight integration of 11R with Pro Tools, that was a huge selling point for 11R. Being able to easily record both DI and effected signal at the same time AND being able to embed the 11R settings right in the track of your session was a huge selling point. I still use that quite a bit. I't great when you are looking for sounds (that looks odd as I read it) and stumble upon just the right sound but fail to write down your settings, or what ever. Maybe you just need to add another part or something and you don't remember what rig you used. Anyway, that was a big deal. Along with the ease of re-amping.
Now, I don't use 11R as my main interface. I use it via S/PDIF, whcih works well for me. Re-amping is a little more complicated but not a huge deal.
For anyone who wants to be on the cutting edge, surely an Eleven Rack is like being in the dark ages, and I get that.
Then again, there all of us old blues guys playing with 20+ year old Hot Rod Deluxes, 40+ year old Super Reverbs and 60+ year old tweed Bassman amps, so there is clearly room for just about everything.
Absolutely. It was "old tech" when it was put into the 11R. It actually had its genesis in the M-Audio Black Box. Roger Lynn contributed to that product. Chris Townsend was the DSP chief.
Cutting edge it is not, but it does what it does remarkably well. Yes, I use in place of my vintage Twin Reverb and my Band Master to record. I even have one that travels with me when I play out, although I do find that I am using it less and using my GT 200 more, now that I have developed some rigs that suit me.