My friend said that the sound of a Virtual Instrument ( eg. Sound of Sylenth1, Kontakt, etc,) differs from daw to daw (which I don't believe). He said that the Sound of the Real Guitar Virtual Instrument sounds better in his Cubase 5 than in Fl Studio (with no fx just the stand-alone plugin but different host)

Is this really the case? Are daws not TRANSPARENT ?

 

Hey medrewb,

From my experience of using most of the major DAW's from Pro Tools to FL Studio. Given that as you said no additional processing plugin has been applied or no channel strips are in place the sound should be the same.

I had the same thought when I started out thinking that cubase sounds much better than ableton, but that was with audio samples. The reason for this was the warping algorith used, if you aren't using any warping or timestreching the audio would not change.

In this case its a VST so in theory it should sound the same, regardless of the host.

One way the sound may differ is when you are automating lets say the cutoff, the reason for this would be the daw's automation curves. For example In FL the automation curve is different to the one in cubase,so since you dont have the same type of automation curve that is why the sound may differ when changing a certain parameter over time.

But at the end of the day if it sounds better to him, it may let him be more creative and productive as he feels that the host he is using sounds better, therefore making him think that his music will sound better.

Hope that helps !!

 

sounds odd to me but i guess it is possible.
how does your mate think it sounds different?
I would think if that was the case then everything would have the same personality. ie. brighter, darker, etc
Not just particular sounds

 

He said the cubase one is bright and the fl is a bit dull..SO STRANGE I got the same sound, nothing seems to change in 4 different daws.. Maybe its my ears? Or maybe its the Cubase encoder or fl encoder that makes changes to HIS sound?

 

I reckon more than likely he's hearing something that isn't there.
possibly cos the displays are different, i try to look away from my screen as often as possible cos it distracts me from what i'm hearing.
Unless there's a noticable difference I would let it worry you though.

 

Ohhhhh nooooooo not again lol JJ. I did a study on a similar topic and found that daws can sound different depending on the bit depth of the internal engine. But if both are running at 32bit float they are identical. I can only asume this is true for plugins too but the research to confirm this takes forever and nobody realy cares...but if you want I can pm you the paper and you can extend the reaserch to cover plugins that is if the final answer is important to you

 

Shoot me the Pm let me have a look ! Yes my friend particularly said that"After the export they sounded different" . I was also thinking maybe it was the encoder engines of both the daw that was different so maybe they sounded different ( But I am surprised that it would be n0ticable to A HUMAN haha ). It could also be the codec of the music player that use different codecs for the two exported files maybe? And clearly he did not use 32-bit float in the final render!

 

I call BS.
Isn't it just different audio interface/cables/monitors/etc?

I can however run Sylenth1 (and other synths and effects) in different over/under-sampling in my other DAW (x2,x4, x8, x16, etc up to x128). That will however change/increase/decrease the quality of the sound, but it can be very draining on the CPU if you go too high.

 

Sorry but

your friend is an absolute idiot.

 

For me the sound differs when you mix multiple channels together. At least i find it more easy to mix things in studio one than in live. In s1 things glue better together whyever.

 

Yeah! I did an experiment of inverting the phase of the sound that was rendered from the cubase and played it together with the same sound rendered from fl studio, they cancel each other :-D.

 

Why is this even a Topic?? This has been gone over so many times. FFs a simple Google search would given the right answer