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I think that the AXR4 is strangely designed.
This is a costly high end interface using legacy digital I/O, limiting it’s extensibility as soon as 96 KHz or more is used.
More, there is no daisy chaining for direct monitoring, this mean that if you need to daisy chain two or three interfaces, you loose even more digital connectivity because an I/O port on each interface will be used for the direct monitoring bus linking.
More the drivers seems to be unfinished as of today (AXR extension not working at the same time as control room).
You could read my comments about this interface in this thread :
Hopefully we’ll see an interface using more modern I/O connectivity in the near future. For the music market a lower cost interface limited at 48 / 96 KHz with AES50 connectivity seems the way to go.
AES50 is a low cost point to point multichannel digital bus, simple and efficient.
This would give a good balance between cost and extensibility, giving access to third party low cost hardware I/O extension through AES50.
Then we’ll find back most of the cost and connectivity advantages we had in the analog word.
The AXR4 seems to be designed for recordings with a low track count, where very high quality (192 or 384 KHz) is needed. Obviously this is a very small market mainly restricted to high end jazz or classic recordings.
Dante is good, has some advantages for large facilities because it’s IP routable through normal Ethernet switches and routers (iso level 3 protocol), but is more expensive.