Latency / Delay and differences in audio between .wav and .mp3 export

[Vaelen]

Hi Ableton community,

I have a weird issue I encountered and its beginning to frustrate me...
I did some testing for quite a while and now I know what I have to do to recreate this phenomen.
I noticed a completely off delay of an delay return track I use and searched for the root cause.
Now I know: When I export the track in .mp3 everything is allright like with the live monitoring in Ableton as is should be.
BUT when I export in .wav the delay is way off and sounds absolutely weird.

I layed both identical exports on top of each other and you can see, that there is a time difference around 58ms between the 2 exports. (Timeline and settings are identical I only changed the export format) So the plucks in the .wav waveform start around 58ms earlier than the .mp3 version
This pure time delay seems to be normal due to .mp3 encoding but that doesnt explain why the correlation between my dry pluck sound and my return delay is so way messed up.

I also can recreate this phenomen when exporting with my second computer and the same files and there -> .mp3 is fine and .wav is horrible

As far as I know my computer specs are not the cause due to offline rendering with an export but I messed around with the settings and it changed nothing.
I also dont route signal back from my return tracks to other tracks.
If I use resampling in .wav everything is ok due to live monitoring.

Here I uploaded both audio files .wav and .mp3 so you can hear the difference and also a snapshot of both waveforms so you can see the difference in timings.

https://1drv.ms/f/s!AnalYKkjXcY9hrcD2Va ... Q?e=eKRdaa

Whats my setup you may ask?
Ableton 11 Live Suite V11.3.3
I recently updated every shitty plugin I got due to this error and updated even my drivers
Desktop1:
Win11
AMD Ryzen 3600
32Gb RAM

Notebook1:
Win11
AMD Ryzen 5600
32Gb RAM

Information about the exported audio:
Synth plugin for the pluck: Serum triggered via MIDI
Gets routed to my RETURN A and C tracks while RETURN A is Reverb and Return C is Delay

And you can hear that the correlation between original dry pluck and the Return C Delay is way off in the .wav version.

I dont know why should the exports be any different except bitdepth / dynamics between .wav and .mp3

Thanks for your help.

Greetings Valentin

[fishmonkey]

i don't know what is causing your issue, however i would suggest always exporting as a WAV and then using another piece of software to do any required lossy encoding from that "master" WAV.

[Vaelen]

i don't know what is causing your issue, however i would suggest always exporting as a WAV and then using another piece of software to do any required lossy encoding from that "master" WAV.

But in my case its bad when I export in .wav and good when I export in mp3...
Like the return tracks are getting encoded differently