Geek Model wrote:
It comes to "Logic sound different then Live" when you start to use DAW plugins. Just this, nothing more. My opinion.
I think most people in this thread in principle agree with this, me included. But there are 2 subtly different aspects at play here. One is doing a master from the DAW being evaluated. Masters can be compared digitally and if nothing uniquely available in only one DAW is affecting sound, the masters should nullify when compared digitally. Which means no audible difference.
The other is the sound or signal produced when playing back a project (for mastering purposes or just interacting with the project). Inefficiency in one DAW could introduce errors into this process which could hypothetically affect the sound. If the (digital) audio bus of the System in use can be recorded outside of the DAW and 2 files can be produced reflecting the "playback sound", then these files can be compared with the nullifying method too. If these files indeed do nullify, then the DAWs can be considered equal as far as sound quality is concerned.
My point here is that these latter "playback masters" may or may not nullify under certain realistic circumstances. If we acknowledge the circumstances when they don't, we can avoid these for example by adding resources or route around weaknesses in the DAW we work with. Or we can go on pretending.
The weakness of this aspect of my argument is of course that a recording process outside of the DAW may affect the sound by itself and if so we wouldn't be comparing what we think.
Basic gear info: Macbook Pro with macOS 10.12, Ableton Live Suite version 9 (64bit) with Ozone, Push and APC20 as controllers.