We hope this will help you understand a thing or 2 before you will freak out.
You may ask yourself:
Different DAW = different Sound Engine ?!
Answer:
They all sound the same.
In sane, sensible, real-world practice there is no measurable difference between them. If you rig a test specifically to wring out the differences between how tiny decimals are rounded or truncated then you might be able to get a miniscule detectible (but not audible) difference between say 32-bit fixed-point results and 64-bit floating point. You can check out Lynn Fuston's Awesome DAWsum CD to compare a bunch of different analog and digital summing, but I can save you the trouble and tell you that among the digital summing busses, there is no difference.
So... what's with all the people who swear that DAW X sounds better than Y? Some of this is plain old "placebo effect," and some of it is user error, and some of it is a third thing I'll get to in a sec. There are several "hidden" ways in which users can very easily and unknowingly make invalid comparisons of what they *think* should be a simple A/B test. One is having dither, or a different type of dither enabled or disabled on one DAW but not the other-- this can give one DAW smoother-sounding tails and greater low-level detail, or another a slightly "veiled" sound with less sense of audio "black space" between notes-- exactly the kind of slight, ephemeral "lower quality" that people often refer to with one vs another. Another far more dramatic, but also easy-to-misunderstand difference is pan law. If you move the exact same project files from one DAW to another, and one of them has a different default pan law, then the difference in size, loudness, apparent detail, stereo spread, and instrument clarity could be pretty dramatic, although still within the realm of stuff that could be mis-heard as "better quality." These kinds of mistakes are easy to make if you don't really know what you're doing.
The one area where there *might* be a real difference is plugin handling. Theoretically all this stuff has specs that the plugin developers and the DAW developers should be following, but most of us are aware that not all plugins get on equally with all hosts. This is technically a *bug* and not a difference in the audio engine, but it's there.
For the record, it is pretty easy to perform a null test (as long as you know exactly what you're doing) to compare DAWs, and they all null completely when used sensibly. If you really push the limits and try to force a project to reveal differences, then you might get microscopic variations down at like -132dB from a 32-bit fixed engine vs a 64-bit float engine, but nothing that is going to be audible in a real double-blind listening test. It's also worth mentioning that fixed-point engines are susceptible to intersample distortion if you were to run all your levels right up to 0dB, but again, in sensible real-world practice it's not going to make any difference, and cakewalk users have nothing to fear since they have 64-bit float, which is the best you can get anyway.
Digital audio engines are just performing mathematical operations, like a calculator. If you plug in 4+4 on your calculator and I plug in 4+4 on mine they should both always spit out 8, unless one is outright broken. The microscopic differences between fixed point and floating-point and 64-bit vs 32-bit are basically like calculators that have 80 decimal places instead of 60, or that chop off the decimals that won't fit vs rounding them. So for instance if you divide 2/3 in one, it might spit out 0.66666666666666666666666666667, and the other might spit out 0.666666666666666666666666666. Those are generally not meaningful audible differences, and they are certainly not the kind of across-the-board "better quality" that is implied in many debates.
These kinds of things come up often on internet message boards, and lots and lots of theories from the brilliant to the preposterous get tossed around, and lots of flames and accusations and ill-will often gets expended before anyone actually goes to the small trouble of posting a reproducable null test, and then it invariably turns out that they are the same.
The best measure of a DAW or any piece of audio equipment is the degree to which it allows you, the engineer, to achieve the most satisfying recordings quickly and easily. We can make objective measurements of a device until we're blue in the face, but if X allows you, the particular user, to achieve the sonic results you're looking for easily and on-the-fly, then it is better than Y if Y does not, no matter who comes along with any kind of mathematical proof or whatever that they are equivalent.
At the end of the day, the objective should be to provide the listener with a satisfying, convincing, and immersive listening experience, and in that sense, some device that has been scientifically proven to achieve some benchmark or another is more or less irrelevant. It is helpful to understand the science, theory, and art of audio, because it makes it easier to achieve a better subjective litening experience. But most of the debates about which DAW is empirically "best" are basically just people trying to justify what they like, and mostly a waste of time.
Pa onda tko zeli neka sanja.
Mislim null test rasprsuje sve mitove naravno dok ga se zna upotrijebiti. To bar nije tesko napraviti i matematicki je dokazano najbilze sto se korisnik moze pribliziti rezultatu (bez poznavanja interne scheme hosta)...
Ludnica....Ovih dana mi stalno dolazi jedna misao u glavu dok razmisljam o svemu ovome. Nevjerovatno je sto je sve covjek sposoban uciniti stvarnim u svojem umu a sve u svrhu samo da bi si olaksao snalazenje u vanjskom svijetu.
Super cinjenica. Vidim mnogo je ljudi to shvatilo i debelo to iskoristava a iz ovog citavog threada vidi se da jos uvijek postoji i more ljudi koji vole biti iskoristeni u tu svrhu i jos se k tome osjecaju dobro. Ma fenomenalno...Obozavam ljude
