Heinz Graaf wrote:In not a million years I see Henke say: "No, sir. Cubase indeed sounds better than Ableton". He has to be retarded to say something like that... Its just marketing and you fellas jump the wagon.
You underestimate my personallity. You underestimate that one of my main roles at the company is: being a pain in the ass, complaining. I am here as a producer who is dedicated to sound, and I am free to say what ever I like. Want to hear complaints? Voila: MIDI Editor couid be improved, I am waiting for the day i can do sourround. Crossfades in arranger missing. I could go on now for an hour, but it is pointless because we all at Ableton know and step by step work on it. So, why am I still almost exclusively using Live? Because even with all these flaws I have more fun producing music with it than I could ever have with the other DAWs. And this is why we are selling te product.
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What makes this thread such a pain is the constant mixture of two completely different stories. There is on one side the technical part. It is no question that a DAW should sound as good as possible. All audio companies inlcuding us work on this and the more CPU resources we will have in the future the better we can become. These are all technical questions. If you want to argue in detail here, you have to have profound knowledge of DSP and you do not need to listen to music at all. Because what applies to audio, applies also to any other form of semi continuous data and the results have nothing to do with believing or feeling at all but can be meassured.
Part two of the story is sound. Sound has nothing to do at all with the above. Speakers from the 50s might certainly sound fantastic and might exactly provide the right kind of coloration needed to do the music one wants to do. But no one could seriously assume that they outperform the top range of monitors build in 2007 as far as dynamic range, linearity, THD etc goes.
But this does not matter, as long as they sound good enough to work with. The first generation of analog to digital converters that turned video tape recorders into digital audio recorders, which were used to store master tapes for CD productions, the Sony PCM F1, had a resolution of 14 (in words: fourteen) bit. How many fantastic sounding, best selling albums have been produced with this technology....
A subjective discussion about part one makes no sense. And if someone like the sound of a vintage tube compressor it is pointless to tell him that this device distorts.
As far as the company Ableton is concerned: yes we work on those things and we take all of you including 3phase serious as long as your arguments make sense and help improving the product.
As a non Ableton person I'd say: If my own mixes sound bad, they do so because I am not good enough. Blaming the tools is absurd, we have paradise in comparison to what Trevor Horn, Alan Parsons,... had available.
I wonder why no one respnoded to a small but important comment i made earlier in this tread. What makes mixing and producing in a 100% digital environment so hard is not the lack of quality, it is the lack of the sum of millions of little nonlinearities any analog environment provides. Thats why some people dedicated to sound still use analog outboard equipment. Nothing keeps you from doing the same. Route a signal into some obscure hardware, route it back into your DAW and you'll have a new, richer sound.
And: where can I listen to those incredibly good sounding productions of 2007 that outperform productions of <1997 and give any hint that new technology really changed anything significantly soundwise?
Robert
but some of those pumping, thumping drum and bass records made over the last 2 years are just plain sic when it comes to production values.