I’m not sure if they offer a demo of Logic…they’re probably selling it mostly on its well-deserved reputation and the fact that it’s probably the best alternative to Pro Tools in the high-end world. Before Pro Tools 9, Logic allowed you both to run whatever sound card you wanted and use the HD DSP cards and TDM plugins if they were available. AFAIK, it’s the only alternative that does that, though I could be wrong.
As for sound cards…yeah, if you have an Audio 8, then all you’d gain with anything middle of the road would be more options for balanced IO. You probably won’t get better converters until you spend at least that much on another one.
As for controllers…you don’t need one yet at all. There’s a lot to be said for even the so-called “entry level” stuff with motorized faders and scribble strips. M-Audio and Avid make stuff in the $1500 range, and Euphonix makes some fairly nice modular stuff that will grow with you. Once you’ve used one, you might find it hard to work without it. That’s actually the one place where I think Ableton just flat-out loses. It doesn’t speak HUI–at least, not the last time I looked at controllers–so you’re limited to MIDI…which more or less eliminates anything with motorized faders that I’m aware of.
As for DAWs…use whatever you’re comfortable with. They don’t sound better or worse, especially now that Pro Tools has automatic plugin delay compensation. They’re different in terms of what plugins they can use and how easy/quick it is to do certain things…and they all have their strengths and weaknesses. I perhaps know Ableton the best…there’s nothing better for live performance, but I think it’s garbage for production/recording…it just takes too long to do some things, and it doesn’t let you use awesome features like window groups. But it doesn’t really matter if you like it.
If you like it, you like it. And that’s kind of all there is to it. For me, Logic is very slightly edging out pro tools just because it runs on my hardware and isn’t tied to Avid’s slower than anything update cycle. And those two win hands-down compared to everything else I’ve tried. But everybody’s different, and there’s something to be said for learning whatever you randomly choose first really well before you go shopping for an alternative…that way your’e not learning “production” at the same time as whatever software. The downside is that they have different ways of solving problems and knowing one really well might make it hard to switch.
In that regard, Ableton does do a few things very differently than others…their signal chain is ridiculously explicit and detailed…possibly more so than some of the others…but it looks a bit different. Plus, there’s the whole session view thing that basically nothing else has…which would be great for sequencing if you have a bunch of grooves you want to use but aren’t sure of the arrangement. In practice, I don’t think it’s worth it…but I just don’t think like that.
Logic → Ableton was a really rough switch. A few years later, Ableton → Logic was a nightmare until I forced myself to learn Pro Tools. Pro Tools and Logic are almost drop in replacements for a lot of tasks…basic setup and the mix windows are very very close, they handle window groups similarly, some of the tool icons and behaviors are similar, etc..
