T2 doesn't sound as good as Nuendo?

[DWS]

he's *that* big a deal and he things 32bit mixing is a hot ticket? Or is that article five years old?

I don't know how old it is.

It seems from the responses that this was a stupid question. - s

[valley]

jarzynka: THat allmost sounds like a driver problem.

[valley]

Because, strange as this must seem, the gullible will believe that more equals better.

I tried that line on a girl I picked up at a club once. It didn't help.

[valley]

he's *that* big a deal and he things 32bit mixing is a hot ticket? Or is that article five years old?

I don't know how old it is.

It'd make a difference to how valid the claim is.

It seems from the responses that this was a stupid question. - s

If you see enough of these threads go by, you'll start to realise that generally there is a lot of talk about "presence" or "air" or any other equally vague explanation of why two programs doing mostly the same thing could sound wildly different.

What you seldom see is serious facts, such as: was dither used on all test candidates, and was it the same dither algorithm. Was it a raw signal that was compared, or were internal processes such as EQ applied. Were the outputs of all candidates normalised to the same level. Etc.

Without knowing any of that, a simple "this sounds better" doesn't tell you anything other than the poster may not know how to set-up for best performance all of the tested hosts.

Hence people tend to be a little skeptical). ;

[jarzynka]

jarzynka: THat allmost sounds like a driver problem.

Valley, yeah that's what I thought, too. Echo never returned my e-mails about it, either. I'm happy to say that Tracktion's audio engine sounds exactly the same playing real-time as it does mixed down! Not to mention, Tracktion makes all my work a lot easier than I ever had it in Cubase!

[nuffink]

It seems from the responses that this was a stupid question. - s

It's not a stupid question, just one that gets asked often. If the responses seemed a bit hostile it's because the questioner usually doesn't believe the truth even when unequivicable proof is provided that all properly coded hosts sound the same. I'm sure that isn't the case with you.

[nuisance sonore]

At first I thought you were making a joke DWS, and a good one at that.
Just in case you're not, this issue has been discussed ad nauseum on numerous music forum, newsgroup, mailing list and mags (on this board also). The conclusion is that a DAW summing bus is basic math, like in 2+2=4, and that all DAWs are the same and I've seen various proof of that fact (the most refered proof is the phase inversion proof).
They are some who still insist that they can ear difference in different DAW, but never was there any actual proof pushed forward by those making an esoterical claim like this, and I doubt Mr. Ainlay "switched to Nuendo" because he thought "it just sound good"; there could be many reasons for switching mixing software, but "it just sound good" isn't one of them.

Oh, and Tracktion 2 now has a 64bits mixing engine, so now every crap sound I trow at it will surely come out as a musical masterpiece

[valley]

Oh, and Tracktion 2 now has a 64bits mixing engine, so now every crap sound I trow at it will surely come out as a musical masterpiece

don't get your hopes up - it hasn't been happening for me.

[DWS]

[quote="valley]What you seldom see is serious facts[/quote]

I believe you, but Mackie is selling T2 as 'sounding better' If that's just hype, then it's false advertising - don't you think?

It's good if you believe them, but it also plants a seed of doubt in the non-techincal minded musicians, who their software seems directly marketed to. - s

[DWS]

At first I thought you were making a joke DWS, and a good one at that.

I wasn't, I'm not that funny. I was on Steinberg's site checking out the new ASIO version when I saw this article. - s

[valley]

I haven't seen Mackie say that T2 sounds better than the competition, merely that it has improvements in mixing that allow it to compete more seriously with high end analogue gear. n That may or may not be marketing fluff, but there are facts given:

-64bit mixing
-192Khz support.

Whether those things matter is by the by, but from a purely mathematical standpoint, 24 tracks mixed at 64 bit, with vst effects running at 192KHz, will be more accurare than 32bit 44.1. If you can actually *hear* it, good luck to you, and whether much or any of that accuracy survives being bounced down to CD is somethign I'd need to test before I were to speculate, but it is 'better.'

[DWS]

I haven't seen Mackie say that T2 sounds better than the competition

I took their claim:

64-BIT, 192KHZ-CAPABLE MIX ENGINE
Much ado has been made about the "summing bus" in DAW software.

as a direct shot at other software. They go on to talk about analog, but if they were really aiming at analog users they wouldn't even need to mention bit depth, it would have been enough to say - the great digital. But that's just my take on it. You're right, it doesn't specifically say that it sounds 'better' than other software. And I believe your facts about summing, but I don't believe Mackie doesn't want amateur and home recordists to think otherwise.

That wasn't the point of this thread anyway. - s

[semiquaver]

someone should make a comparison - bit for bit - of the summing busses of some DAWs - no eq etc etc and see if there is any real difference at all (I would suspect the answer for all 32 bit float folks will be no).

The only place where I could see some difference would be dither/noiseshaping at the end or some sloppy implementation of faders making a negative difference.

I have read on the web that floating-point arithmetic introduces some error vis a vis fixed but the difference would have to be very very slight.

In the end I suspect that what we have here is mystification plain and simple. But lets do those tests... I could do it for DP T and GB.....

[valley]

as a direct shot at other software. They go on to talk about analog, but if they were really aiming at analog users they wouldn't even need to mention bit depth, it would have been enough to say - the great digital.

you're probably missing some background then.

Back in the early days an awful lot of noise was made about 'headroom' and how digital recording had less headroom than analogue.

Some of that was based in fact, but a lot of it was pure spinal tap: digital has a hard ceiling beyond which you cannot raise the input level, analogue has a softer ceiling curve so you can record a little above 0db. The argument therefore went: "analogue has more headroom becuase you can exceed 0db" which is a little illogical, because clearly there is a point ast which you can't pack any higher a signal onto analogue tape, and you could just as easily call *that* point 0db - but this one goes to 11.

As digital recording depth increased, the comparison between analogue and digital become less clear, bvut still that headroom argument persists. What Mackie are trying to sell is the idea that digital now has all the bandiwth and frequency range of high end analogue equipment. In that claim, they are actually being honest.

[braj]

Why is he named after a drill attachment?

Because he's a tool

Or at least since the article was on Steinberg's website as marketing material, he was at least being used as one.

I don't put too much weight behind cherry-picking reviews and commentary for advertising. Remember how the American public was sold the Iraq war? It just may be faulty intelligence.