This is not really true, there are surprisingly many ways to do the same thing. The differences are just not where you would expect them if you have no expert knowledge, and they are all in a range way below of what I personally believe is audible.Michael-SW wrote:Mixing desks sound different because they use different hardware. DAWs sound exactly the same because they are all using the same mathematical algorithms.
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Of course summing two or more tracks in every DAW is output = a+b+c+d, where a = signal of track a * volume of track a . So it is impossible to introduce here compression or any change in frequency response, and the dynmanic range if you do this with normal floating point mathematics is allready super big, not talking about the headroom if you do it with 64bit resolution.
But there are other details: if you draw a volume automation curve and this curve has a sharp edge theory says that this edge introduces nonlinear distortions to the signal. A good example for this is what is called "zipper noise" when moving a MIDI fader on a cheap audio processor.MIDI resolution is 128 steps. If you move a fader assigned to volume and you do no further smoothing you will get a bit of noise every time a new value comes in. In order to avoid this you have to create a smooth ramp instead of a sharp edge. This is known and every DAW manufacturer of course does some kind of ramping. But this is nothing where you can look up the one perfect way to do it in some research paper and every company does it like that. Instead it is always a compromise between reaction speed, cpu usage, and resulting quality. Some of our competitors are quite conservative here, they do very long ramps. This minimizes distortion but also makes all automation a bit floppy. Others prefer punchy automation, and as a result are more likely to introduce more distortion. Unless they use a more intelligent alogortihm. Which east more CPU or introduces latency... and so on.
This is just one example. There are probably a dozend places in a DAW where there is a potential differerence. So, yes, they all do sound different. But it is important to understand that this is a very very accademic way to look at it, because as mentoned before, the effects are in a range of -120db if things are really bad and maybe -160dB typically. Every active speaker introduces a noise floor way above this, every microphone has less dynamic range, not talking about a typical recording environment.
I personally would judge a DAW by all kinds of things but certainly not buy its meassured sound quality. Much more important is: do i like the way the EQs works, am i fine with the compressor, can i use my favourite plug ins with it and so on. This is what will shape the sound of my productions and not the ramping algorithm.
Robert
