Question About YouTube Video Showing Imperceptible Summing Differences Between Daws

[elitelecaster]

I really don’t want this to turn into the age-old discussion of people trying to argue that daws sound different, but I’m currently thinking of switching from Ableton to something else and I ran across this video:
https://youtu.be/CHzsRs5LLOU?si=1Yd-cHsR4YBWeT3m

In it, this guy claims that he rendered a multitracked song in a bunch of different daws. He claims to have not touched faders or panning. While they seem to null on the faders, there is a difference shown by noise at about -100db.

Is the replicable? I don’t have the ability to download a bunch of daws right now to try it out, but I’d like to have a definitive answer. Are there really imperceptible, minuscule differences in the summing between daws?

[jens]

Are there really imperceptible, minuscule differences in the summing between daws?

Yes, of course.

[elitelecaster]

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Are there really imperceptible, minuscule differences in the summing between daws?

Yes, of course. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-off_error)

Yes this makes sense, but (and this may be me not totally understanding) why could he get reaper to completely null with itself using two separate rendering algorithms? I would assume that these algorithms would have different rounding errors, and therefore you would see some kind of extremely low level noise.

Doesn’t this point to the differences between daws in this video not being a result of rounding errors, as roughly the same amount of different rounding errors would be expected for each daw?

Or perhaps I’m wrong and it’s as simple as different summing algorithms create different rounding errors, therefore, even though it’s imperceptible, daw outputs are actually slightly different?

[jens]

I would expect the rounding errors to mainly depend on the order in which the individual values are summed, which should always be the same within the same DAW, but which might differ between different DAWs.

[BertKoor]

Firstly, how does one transfer a project from one DAW to another "without touching anything" ? Afaik that's not doable/possible. You can try, but it's a manual process. Unless all faders are set to 0dB gain (yes, I have not looked at the video)

-100dB is about the level of dithering noise. Compact disks with their 16 bits have a dynamical range of 96dB. With modern loudness being in single digits, a diff at -100dB is totally imperceivable.