What is the best sounding DAW??

[toonertik]

the beSt from then .. pRo tooLs , Nuendo, Samplitude.
noW FL12, pRo tooLs, cubAse, miXcraft 8
***I had the same feeling that the DAW didn't matter, but as sound engines get updated by developers the same holds true ((sample rate, and hardware))

Damm it..
I turned off "automatic sound engineer updates"
OK developers.. I am ready now... SP1 or SP2?
Or just a good SERVICING

[vurt]

its because you don't randomly throw capitals around.
don't they realise it means people like me get left with none

[T-CM11]

A friend of the brother of the neighbour of a random person on the internet told the husband of the sister of my mom that Cubase sounds the best. I initially refused to believe it, but the voices in my head kept telling me that I should feel positive about such a respectable source.

[pettinhouse]

010101010101

[thecontrolcentre]

Is it Cakewalk by Bandlab?

[T-CM11]

Is it Cakewalk by Bandlab?

Twelve Tone Systems made it sound a lot warmer, more 3D!

[flostri]

So 13 pages of posts later I want to know: which one is it?

[chk071]

Mine.

[martinjuenke]

010101010101

That‘s pretty warm ...

[AxlMaldini]

Of course daws sound different. For example magix's daws produce kind of softened sound while DP more neutral and masculine like. And the most important thing according to the words' of openmpt's developers is the resampling algorithm. By the way they have confessed that resampling algos they use are not the best and not optimal and that they even are not going to implement the best algorithms. So you should keep in mind that all opensource daws, trackers and etc will always have inferior algorithms just as per desire of those "kind-hearted" developers of open-source software secretly sponsored by corporations. And when someone appears like Hannu Savolainen who wanted to develop pro quality audio driver for nix systems he is fastly neutralized. Alsa has no bypass for its mixer, so you can't get kernel streaming or wavert as on windows. That's why you will ALWAYS have larger latency on linux as well as worse sound. Keep it in mind. Openmpt supports wavert output and you can check that its faster than asio with at least the same quality. Kernel streaming is not available on foobar2000 and they have not even developed a wavert output plugin, that's why you should use albumplayer instead of foobar2000 with which you can have kernel streaming and bypass any mixers. Early versions of sequoia had wavert support which is absent now. Unlike openmpt's developers the developer of schism tracker confessed that his product produces studio like quality without need for buying expensive hardware. Unfortunately his product is only 32-bit for windows and for linux with low-quality driver it makes no sense whatever bitness it may have. As for openmpt's sound you may find that it gives most natural sound for libs run inside kontakt vst. All other daws somehow change hue of kontakt libs. I was impressed how they sound in openmpt but as I have said above all this will be spoiled on the stage of rendering when medium quality resamplers will be applied. That's why currently I would use DP provided it did not cause reboots which it does.
Also daws have plugin delay compensation feature which detects compensation values differently in different daws and this might cause different time shifts which are also phase shifts and phase shifts cause appearance of new harmonics. You can read about this rs-met plugins' developer's educating pdfs. Those harmonics may contribute to own hue of a daw's sound. But I am sure it's not the only cause. Another one is the resampler and perhaps other factors like use of hardware acceleration, use of OS's libs like ms visual c which may have mediocre quality algos and etc. By the way kmixer of windows XP is said to produce very noisy SNR of 80db according to ms' documentation officially. So whichever direction you look at you see there is something not perfect which will hardly be fixed. And we wonder why sound quality is not like in hw studios. Every time you lower sound volume by a fader you lose detail in sound. That's the main drawback of the digital technology because its best quality is provided at the maximum volume. But how could it be solved? We need to have some headroom in daws to only increase sound volumes and never decrease. But do you know any such daw which can do it? On the contrary they make you monitor volume all the time to stay lower than 0 db throughout the entire signal processing chain. Though frankly speaking I am not very knowledgeable to this subject ie if they allow mixing at volumes much higher than 0 like +6db for example. I saw a video where a guy increased volume by 1000 times in a track in sequoia and decrased volume by 1000 times on master and played back and quality remained the same. Can it mean it's a kind of non-destructive feature where sequia just have calculated that it should not change volume at all and just played it back with original volume or does it mean that sequia allows mixing at almost infinitely larger volume than 0db I don't know...
I has been kind of disappointed with DP recently because it reboots my pc and consumes a lot of cpu. That's why I won't use anymore. Samplitude seems to be the way to go because it's most stable, has retrospective recording and other valuable features like good manuals and generally it looks like a porsche for sound compared vs other daws. Perhaps someone can hack openmpt to change its resamplers by the highest quality ones in which case it will be the way to go. Or sponsor schism development to make it 64-bit and there are confessions already that it sounds better than openmpt.
Another pitfall concerns vst format. It uses floating-point calculations which are less exact than integer and produce softening and antialiasing effect which should be noticeable in reverb tails especially. Openmpt is only one which I know to use 32bit integer. Protools is said to use 48bit integer and own plugin format to match that value.
But as it seems impossible to get studio sound on pc perhaps it makes sense to focus on the choice of plugins and just think more about composition than about sound quality trying to mask low quality by skillful equalizing and panning. And the main foe to struggle against is lack of highs which is an major drawback of the digital technology perhaps because in the case of highs daws have to calculate much larger values which spoils RT capabilities.

[Double Tap]

Haven't read the thread but assuming someone has already mentioned that the best sounding Daw is obviously Ray Manzarek?