Ableton 8 vs Cubase 5

afaik the soundcard is just for listening purposes and has fuck all to do with the sound daw.

doesnt make any difference if i render without my soundcard plugged in.

i dont get why cubase should have a better soundquality, if i lets say, make some drums from samples, use the same plugins as in fl and add some bass using massive? imho you could do that using audacity and itll probably sound the same (without vst here obviously tho) if you do it well.
 
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afaik the soundcard is just for listening purposes and has fuck all to do with the sound daw.

i would be inclined to agree... i was merely using it for illustrative purposes, of something that can produce a different quality of sound when given the same info in.

i dont get why cubase should have a better soundquality, if i lets say, make some drums from samples, use the same plugins as in fl and add some bass using massive? imho you could do that using audacity and itll probably sound the same (without vst here obviously tho) if you do it well.

'better' is subjective for one, as one mans rain is another mans sun and all that... but to be honest, i'm arguing that the engines handle the code differently... not that one is better than the other!
 
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---------- Post added at 15:21 ---------- Previous post was at 15:18 ----------



i would be inclined to agree... i was merely using it for illustrative purposes, of something that can produce a different quality of sound when given the same info in.



'better' is subjective for one, as one mans rain is another mans sun and all that... but to be honest, i'm arguing that the engines handle the code differently... not that one is better than the other!

These engines are much more complex than we think ( I think that you think its complex but its more complex than what I think you think,really just think about it mate :towelie: ) I cant understand it properly but Massive for example have engine that makes high freqencies more smooth ,thats why it can handle more distortion before being un-enjoyable.Theres much more thing than that what makes Massive best,people who made it really knows their stuff... its latest,most advanced synth technology ever built.
 
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The fact that they all sound the same has been proven time and time again, in many different tests, on this board too. Well, not on this board as I did it once but didn't post examples because I wanted people to see for themselves. The thread will turn up if you search "audio engine" and "fruity".

I found a good explanation of all this:

http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.aspx?m=1184416

They all sound the same.

In sane, sensible, real-world practice there is no measurable difference between them. If you rig a test specifically to wring out the differences between how tiny decimals are rounded or truncated then you might be able to get a miniscule detectible (but not audible) difference between say 32-bit fixed-point results and 64-bit floating point. You can check out Lynn Fuston's Awesome DAWsum CD to compare a bunch of different analog and digital summing, but I can save you the trouble and tell you that among the digital summing busses, there is no difference.

So... what's with all the people who swear that DAW X sounds better than Y? Some of this is plain old "placebo effect," and some of it is user error, and some of it is a third thing I'll get to in a sec. There are several "hidden" ways in which users can very easily and unknowingly make invalid comparisons of what they *think* should be a simple A/B test. One is having dither, or a different type of dither enabled or disabled on one DAW but not the other-- this can give one DAW smoother-sounding tails and greater low-level detail, or another a slightly "veiled" sound with less sense of audio "black space" between notes-- exactly the kind of slight, ephemeral "lower quality" that people often refer to with one vs another. Another far more dramatic, but also easy-to-misunderstand difference is pan law. If you move the exact same project files from one DAW to another, and one of them has a different default pan law, then the difference in size, loudness, apparent detail, stereo spread, and instrument clarity could be pretty dramatic, although still within the realm of stuff that could be mis-heard as "better quality." These kinds of mistakes are easy to make if you don't really know what you're doing.

The one area where there *might* be a real difference is plugin handling. Theoretically all this stuff has specs that the plugin developers and the DAW developers should be following, but most of us are aware that not all plugins get on equally with all hosts. This is technically a *bug* and not a difference in the audio engine, but it's there.

For the record, it is pretty easy to perform a null test (as long as you know exactly what you're doing) to compare DAWs, and they all null completely when used sensibly. If you really push the limits and try to force a project to reveal differences, then you might get microscopic variations down at like -132dB from a 32-bit fixed engine vs a 64-bit float engine, but nothing that is going to be audible in a real double-blind listening test. It's also worth mentioning that fixed-point engines are susceptible to intersample distortion if you were to run all your levels right up to 0dB, but again, in sensible real-world practice it's not going to make any difference, and cakewalk users have nothing to fear since they have 64-bit float, which is the best you can get anyway.

Digital audio engines are just performing mathematical operations, like a calculator. If you plug in 4+4 on your calculator and I plug in 4+4 on mine they should both always spit out 8, unless one is outright broken. The microscopic differences between fixed point and floating-point and 64-bit vs 32-bit are basically like calculators that have 80 decimal places instead of 60, or that chop off the decimals that won't fit vs rounding them. So for instance if you divide 2/3 in one, it might spit out 0.66666666666666666666666666667, and the other might spit out 0.666666666666666666666666666. Those are generally not meaningful audible differences, and they are certainly not the kind of across-the-board "better quality" that is implied in many debates.

These kinds of things come up often on internet message boards, and lots and lots of theories from the brilliant to the preposterous get tossed around, and lots of flames and accusations and ill-will often gets expended before anyone actually goes to the small trouble of posting a reproducable null test, and then it invariably turns out that they are the same.

Cheers.
 
what a silly thread

It doesn't matter what DAW you use, you can make pretty much do the same things with any DAW
It's all just personal preference
 
big ups kama, thanks a lot...

but here we go... when they are different panning laws, what do they actually do? and should i be turning fruitys default panning law off when producing?
 
The fact that they all sound the same has been proven time and time again, in many different tests, on this board too. Well, not on this board as I did it once but didn't post examples because I wanted people to see for themselves. The thread will turn up if you search "audio engine" and "fruity".

I found a good explanation of all this:

hard to argue with that i suppose...
 
workflow vs workflow
get to know vs get to know.

thread is missing the point and was destroyed by Kama's post imho
 
ugh, what a mess of a thread. someone should find/make a clear thread explaining that the sound quality of DAWS is pretty fucking decent and the same, whatever you use, and sticky that shit! Lets also end the ''WHAT DAW SHOULD A BEGINNER USE???'' threads, simple really, no?
 
I wouldn't know. If it sounds better with the def pan law off, it needs to be off. That's teh point of it all - that it's subjective.

i dont hear any differences apart from the track being 3db louder without the panning law on. so i dont get it at all.
 
u shouldn't be slating any daw's they are all beautiful instruments played in the right hands ! abelton has many more functions than cubase aka is far more reliable for live performance !
 
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