KVR Audio

stale bread · Post by **stale bread** » Wed Mar 09, 2005 9:23 pm

in other words. turn off the time stretching dude

Harvesteridios · Post by **Harvesteridios** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 12:04 am

Lunch Money wrote:The audible difference in Live will be almost entirely a result of the pitch-shifting and time-stretching, even if a loops is only re-aligned by 1 bpm. If your composition uses the unaltered files, there will not be a sound difference.

Greg

I thought about that so i used same loops, same tempo in both hosts. Anyway, if the difference is so difficult to be heard my only concern is if the difference is audible when the track is mastered properly. Probably not, but since everybody is talking about that it's natural to take it as a possibility

Thanx for the posts...

Scotrick · Post by **Scotrick** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 1:02 am

for the person that wanted a way to 'test,' what you do is mix the same audio in each host, then export that audio down to a stereo or mono wav... import into a program like wavelab, and then invert one of the test files... together the two files 'sum,' to zero... which means that they're bit for bit identical...
some wave editing programs have built-in tools for examining such tests...

at one point a test was done with all of the major DAWs at the time, and they all summed to zip...

and as for trusting your ears, I'm not sure they're any more infallible than your eyes, and both are connected directly to our memory, as you must remember one thing while comparing it to something else...

if you want to talk about the veracity of memory, I can tell you from my psychology classes that human memory is lousy for specifics and very easy influenced ... just as our ears are influenced by such unrelated items as the GUI, the looks of the monitor speakers, the space we're in while we're listening and so on...

even if there were differences, which I doubt, such differences would be so very very slight, that spending a bunch of time and energy worrying about that difference seems pointless, when that energy could be spent studying some compositional elements or whatever to make the composition itself 'better.'

stale bread · Post by **stale bread** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 4:06 am

Harvesteridios wrote:
Lunch Money wrote:The audible difference in Live will be almost entirely a result of the pitch-shifting and time-stretching, even if a loops is only re-aligned by 1 bpm. If your composition uses the unaltered files, there will not be a sound difference.

Greg

I thought about that so i used same loops, same tempo in both hosts. .

but did you disable the timestretching feature in Live?

Rusty Shackleford · Post by **Rusty Shackleford** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 4:21 am

I couldn't speak for the summing engine but i'm sure cubase's plugin delay compensation helps with the sound too. Many people reported that Digital Performer sounds way better since PDC was implemented in v4.5.

Andywanders · Post by **Andywanders** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 4:54 am

Harvesteridios wrote:I use cubase for a long time and just now I tried Live, which is an excellent piece of software. The problem is that I think that it has lower sound quality than the other sequencers that I've used from time to time.

If you can hear a difference, then there IS a difference.

Trust your ears.

Harvesteridios wrote:Is it just me?

No, it's not just you. It's been mentioned here before.

BTW... I tried the demo and I can also HEAR a difference between Live and Logic.

For me, there's a difference - I prefer Logic. But others say there's no difference, or that it's not possible for there to be a difference for whatever reason. They would say that I'm imagining it. If I were to believe them, then I would not be able to trust my hearing.

I'd rather trust my ears.

efluon · Post by **efluon** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 6:10 am

all the hosts doing the same thing sound the same. defaults for things such as pan-law may be different, leading to a louder playback (what sometimes would be called better sound). apart from protools, which perhaps sounds not as good as the other hosts as it uses fixed-point dsps (while everyone else uses floats for mixing).

efluon · Post by **efluon** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 6:15 am

andywanders wrote: If you can hear a difference, then there IS a difference.

Trust your ears.
..

yeah. if you hear a difference, there will be one. so go find out which settings are different (ie turn timestretching off, use same pan-law, switch off eq's, etc).
plugins will sure sound different.

BertKoor · Post by **BertKoor** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 10:35 pm

alabamian wrote:for the person that wanted a way to 'test,' what you do is mix the same audio in each host, then export that audio down to a stereo or mono wav... import into a program like wavelab, and then invert one of the test files... together the two files 'sum,' to zero... which means that they're bit for bit identical...

This sounds like a reasonable approach. I'm all game for it. Any recommendations on what type of material, or how many tracks or how to mix exactly?

alabamian wrote:at one point a test was done with all of the major DAWs at the time, and they all summed to zip...

Was this a long time ago? New versions can spoil it maybe... And why is there no reference to those test setups anymore?

I do trust my ears to some extent, but for some things like decibel levels proper measuring tools are far better. If you set up a test properly, the figures will not lie to you.

alabamian wrote:even if there were differences, which I doubt, such differences would be so very very slight, that spending a bunch of time and energy worrying about that difference seems pointless, when that energy could be spent studying some compositional elements or whatever to make the composition itself 'better.'

Sometimes you have to deliver some proof to let the bullshit stop. I want to see that proof. It can't be too difficult...

BertKoor · Post by **BertKoor** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 11:12 pm

Update: I have found a Host comparison test thread of not too long ago, but nobody seemed to be interested in carrying it out. It looks not too hard to carry out...

lex_strooder · Post by **lex_strooder** » Thu Mar 10, 2005 11:41 pm

efluon wrote:all the hosts doing the same thing sound the same. defaults for things such as pan-law may be different, leading to a louder playback (what sometimes would be called better sound).

But all hosts are not doing the same thing !

efluon wrote: apart from protools, which perhaps sounds not as good as the other hosts as it uses fixed-point dsps (while everyone else uses floats for mixing).

And some argues that its the fixed-point that makes it sound better !

dramsenik · Post by **dramsenik** » Fri Mar 11, 2005 12:35 am

efluon wrote:all the hosts doing the same thing sound the same. defaults for things such as pan-law may be different, leading to a louder playback (what sometimes would be called better sound). apart from protools, which perhaps sounds not as good as the other hosts as it uses fixed-point dsps (while everyone else uses floats for mixing).

so what do you suggest to improve this modest studio
http://www.darkhorserecording.com/thecabin.html

dramsenik · Post by **dramsenik** » Fri Mar 11, 2005 12:49 am

Just for your records: TDM uses a 48 bit, double precision mix engine and LE uses 32 bit floating point just like most other hosts.

C00kie · Post by **C00kie** » Sat Mar 12, 2005 3:56 pm

Same source material in different hosts should sound the same... Now where do all these claims of different sounding hosts come from? Plain ignorance?

aldi · Post by **aldi** » Sun Mar 13, 2005 1:21 am

Does Ableton Live sound as good as cubase?