If critical listeners and professional mixers could hear a difference, they would all, I mean all of them would stick to just one DAW.

Music Production is a very subjective field that even these pros can not be on the top forever.

 

Not always...I mentioned above the blind test of sound cards that was organized somewhere 10 years ago: 500 listeners in a hall were proposed to find which s. card was playing (one unit cost was $1000 and other's $25).
So what? 50/50 was the result, i.e. 50% of listeners (among them were musicians and audio engineers) couldn't determine which s.card sounded (1000 vs 25).

The same about DAWs...do you follow me: sound engineers got failed!

 

So?
5 pages of arguing yet no one has been able to determine which daw sounds best?
Come on guys, you can do better than that: do you want to make a bad impression in front of the noobs?

 

arguing which daw sounds best is like arguing which blank painting canvas looks best

 

Arguing about DAW sound is like arguing about gravity.
There is NO DAW sound because it is DIGITAL SUMMING.
1+1 = 2 like it or not

Jump out the window and scream "gravity doesn't exist !"
After that, come back and tell us ...

 

No, you get it wrong...once more about sound cards, I have 3 of them:
old fashioned SB Audigy 2zs Platinum Pro (2004y)
NI Komplete Audio 6 (2014y)
and...integrated Realtech HD built in in my old notebook(2006y)

Which one is the best? None! They just sound different, and even Realtech can compete with others 2 (with exception hard projects with lots of VST)

The same with DAWs

 

If you say that the daws sound different, that means there is also a way to prove it with accurate measurements. If you start talking about quality differences measurable exclusively with personal perception then what you claim goes beyond physics and science in general: you are entering the field of spirituality and the occult.
Up to a certain degree I'm with you: our 5 senses tell us only a part of reality, there is much, much more out there... Art is something metaphysical and cannot be measured with scientific methods.
Basically, if deep inside you feel that Ableton sounds depressive and Cubase vibrates in harmony with the universe, then you have to follow your instincts, you will surely be more creative with Cubase.

 

Steinberg's DAW not even v0.0.0.1...from 1986 this is awesome I was 3 years old at this time

 

You made me think about Depeche Mode and this first sequencer ... but not live gig :D

 

So have we reached a conclusion yet? Does anyone benefit if all DAWS sound "the same"? Who? A developer trying to sell their product?

Or is this all working towards having one less excuse why someone's music/production is not as good as others?

 

Last edited: Aug 5, 2022

Of course, the one who is going to buy a Daw and is going to think that by spending more it will sound better.

Does it seem strange to you? It would not be the first time. many companies do it, that's how the market works

 

Logic is the anomaly to that sales model. They aren't trying to sell you a $200 program that does what a 500$ program does and more; they are selling you a computer. And of course, they have all the money in the world to hire programmers who can handle audio correctly. Being a large publicly traded company most certainly means all the code is audited as it is written.

But the funny thing is this. You see plugin developers all the time re-write their plugins for whatever reason. And the same people saying that one DAW and another perform the same will be the first to tell you the old version of such a plugin sounds better.

I think if the same programmers re-wrote logic from the ground up, it wouldn't sound identical to itself either. It is such a big program there are plenty of opportunities for a few lines of bad code to be written. So I am not sure how someone would expect it to be identical.

It's like people forget they are going to bounce, reload the file and process it more anyway. They can be different and it still doesn't mean jack.

 

Last edited: Aug 5, 2022

What they are saying is "People don't understand so we will tell them it "sounds" better.

But if they alter the sound in any audible way other than the accept standardized conversions, they are fucking it up and they will be verbally raped on social media by the professionals in the industry.

 

Don't older DAWs have a more "vintage" sound?

 

You forgot to mention most important science related to sounds and human ears specifics, and this is
PSYCHOACOUSTIC
I don't know about western researches in this area I only read book of a Russian specialist Aldoshina...
and now example from own musical experience:
decades ago I played in a band as guitarist and we had to play a gig, then our bass player disappeared and I should play the bass instead him...I knew the songs, but I didn't know the bass parts of them...
so, what I did: songs we played were very popular and had air plays daily, then I put on my tape recorder's mic to the radio net speaker and in the evening recorded most of the songs we needed.
Then I picked up the bass part by ear...
but there is a "little nuance": the radio speaker could play frequencies from 500-10000Hz only, well but the bass diapasone is much lower, how could I hear the bass if it's absent?
The answer is done by psychoacoustics: our ears hear the harmonics which are 2,4 etc times higher and automatically
"calculates" the absent main tones of a bass!
But I'had known this years later after Aldoshina book...

was it interesting? And this is 1/1000000 of what that science researches...

 

Last edited: Aug 5, 2022

Cubase 12 is better than the 5 version not because of the audio engine quality, but new features including interface, stock plug-ins, organized VST folders and many others

These white illusions make us believe that the newest version always sounds better.

It is all about marketing

 

I think the question is not the right question. If you are only summing audio channels and render the audio without any processing or dithering or clipping, there should be no difference. The reason for that is that it is pure math and you can't change it really. You could have the math wrong in the first place, but then you wouldn't get to the point where you could sell your daw I assume. Then again nobody is going to use a daw like that. So if you use software synths or any plugins the sound will probably change in certain ways. The different daws don't use the same algorithms to calculate the amount of samples the sound needs to be delayed, the sound quality of the stock plugins is different and might even change from program version to program version and people do tend to use them. So in a real world scenario daws can sound different in some ways. But there is another truth. If you are not able to get a decent result with Cubase 5 today, you won't be able to get it with Cubase 12 either unless you practice. The daw will not be the limiting factor.

 

(Not gonna read the previous 5 pages, sorry if this is a dup :P)

Computers can't use pure math though. You can't handle all the digits of Pi or fractions like 1/3 with infinite precision. That would take infinitely long and take an infinite amount of storage.

For example (broadly speaking):
On both 32bit and 64bit DAWs with 32bit mixing, Pi is exactly this value and can not be more precise than:

3.14159265358979323846

On 64bit DAWs with 64bit mixing, Pi is exactly this, much more precise, value:

3.141592653589793115997963468544185161590576171875

Not all DAWs sum/mix in 64bit. I think Logic only got a 64bit bus in 2017.

This is also true for plugins. When you write a VST plugin, you must decide with how much precision you want to work internally and how much precision to request from the DAW.

In other words, many plugins from before 2015 and virtually all plugins from before ~2012 are working with 32bit precision internally, even if they were later re-released for 64bit DAWs.

The mda suite of plugins for example uses 32bit precision internally even if you compile it for a 64bit DAW.

I reworked 'mda Pseudo-Stereo' to use 64bit internally and request 64bit numbers from the DAW. A null test with the version that uses 32bit internally spiked at up to -72dB (but mostly sat around -100-115dB). I'd consider -72dB the edge of audibility.

Of course, once you start introducing rounding errors, you're going to propagate them to the next plugin in your chain and the one after that and so on.

Does it matter in a mix? Eeeeeehhh, mayhaps? You decide.

 

All said for me.

 

Hi, new here, been producing for ten years now and I work as a mix and master engineer in France, but I make beats too, started on FL and I was so attached to my DAW haha, but I could hear a difference between my productions and my friends', especially when I went to a friend's house with my drumkits, using the same sounds on Ableton really didn't sound the same than on FL, recording vocals with the same mic/interface sounded different too.
I was really confused so I spent a month testing every DAW I found, went through the classics Protools, Logic, Ableton, Cubase, but also less used ones like Reaper, Sequoia, Pyramix and Ardour. My way of testing was first by ear, I would just import the same 3 sounds, usually a one shot of a Pad, a Kick and a Snare at 120bpm, trying to get exactly the same sequence, no plugins, everything at unity gain. I heard differences but I still didn't want to believe it hahaa, so I took out the drums and smashed my pad sample with a waves L2 on all of the DAWs, around 12db of GR and did a null test (which I did on most of the daws too to be sure) and I always found a noise around -60dbFS, which sounded different for every DAW duo.
So I smashed it even more, duplicating the L2 two times and I got the null tests to get a noise around -40dbFS and I kinda recognize what I was hearing all those years, when I had Logic or Ableton in the null combo the differences was the higher. So I think Cubase, Protools Reaper, Sequoia, Pyramix all kinda use the same code but my guess is that Ableton and Logic really have something that differs.
I also did a multiple speaker test and Logic was the one which gave me the renders that sounded the most identical on all speakers, my feeling is that it gives a dynamic in the low freqs, which gives a more "natural" feeling to everything, kinda de-harshing my mixs. But it kinda smashed my drum transients (hats and snare).
Now I produce beats in FL, Ableton or Protools because it gives me more transient, I usually try to mix my beat on it too and render the 2 track to do kind of a stem mastering in Logic, I always master in Logic.
Recently I also found that vocal tones when I record in Logic sound more modern, more bassy, it sounds best especially for vocalists that have low voices, tall male rappers that sing at low volumes are the ones I hear the most differences on.
I believed the 1+1 = 2 argument for years but I couldn't stop myself to hear those differences, and the null test really proves it even if you hear no differences.
Here's my two sense, you should always test things for yourself when you can, believing others' opinion only works if you're in a situation when testing is impossible.