A friend of mine who’s working at a music shop and who’s also a former Renoiser keep telling that Renoise audio engine sucks and I should at least rewire it to, for instance, Live.
I have very little knowledge about audio engines in general and no experience at all with other DAWs so I can’t really deny or approve.
What would make Renoise AE different than others, are some of them objectively better than others and if so, why ?
Not this again. Please.
Unless your friend actually has some specific points to argue other than “it sucks”, this thread is going to go nowhere very fast.
I did a search and found a couple of threads discussing this but nothing that told me what makes an audio engine, for instance Renoise’s, different than another and that’s what I’m curious about really.
I thought I’d ask it here because I use Renoise. Sorry if that’s redundant…
I guess I’ll just give him the palmface the next time he goes about it 
I can’t believe you have just read this whole thread which goes into it quite well!
No, I missed that one.
All apologies everyone. I promise I’ll look deeper before asking a question next time 
Hey. First of all, I should apologise for the bluntness of my first reply. I didn’t mean to be dismissive with you, or to somehow imply that what you said was stupid.
I’m just frustrated because we do get these kinds of posts once in a while, but 99.99% of the time absolutely nothing gets resolved. People claim that they can hear a difference, or they can talk for pages and pages about how they feel like something is wrong, but they never seem to be able to provide any solid proof.
The reality is that in almost all cases there is a huge psychological/placebo factor involved. People are led to believe that more expensive DAWs like Cubase will somehow sound better than cheaper software, or that freeware VST plug-ins could never possibly sound better than insanely expensive ones, etc. Even something ridiculously basic like a difference in volume (ie. Renoise having -6dB headroom by default) can cause people to perceive a “huge” difference in “sound quality” that simply doesn’t exist.
Having a feeling or a hunch about something is totally useless here. This is not magic or some weird mystical process; this is digital audio, this is mathematics, this is science. Signals can be rendered precisely the same way each time, accurate testing can be performed on reliable data, results can be analysed and scrutinized. If there is a problem, then it can be found and proven (and hopefully fixed) through proper testing.
I do enjoy helping people, and I love trying to get to the bottom of these types of claims (you’ll find a lot of posts on this forum where I’m trying to do so), because I do have a genuine desire to figure things out and find the truth, but I’m a bit tired of arguing with people who make such claims without having the knowledge to actually back up what they’re saying, or people who are simply unwilling to accept that what they’re experiencing might just be in their head.
The trouble is that there’s far too much snake oil and bullshit in the world of audio; too many buzzwords being thrown around; too many people taking random, unrelated snippets of information they found and then mashing them together to form their own ridiculously incorrect opinions of how things work.
Suddenly everybody feels like they’re an expert on topics like “summing”, or that they have a deep understanding of DSP algorithms because they noticed that their cracked copy of Waves sounds better than a Synthedit filter, or they become utterly convinced that a 64-bit DAW is essential for creating “high quality” sound because of what some clueless 13-year-old idiot said in a Youtube comment, and so on.
Anyway… 
- do as he suggests and render one version rewired and another one with just renoise.
- name them a and b and ask him if he can tell which is which.
- ???
- PROFIT
I am 100% sure that this is what this guy was talking about.
I used to think that Cubase sounded better than Live for the same reason (Cubase plays back hotter than Live - and hotter than it renders). However, if you render the same material back in both DAWs, if you invert the phase on one of the results and paste it back on the other, they cancel so close to perfectly that the human ear cannot hear what remains. That’s how I proved to myself that it’s bullshit.
I have not tried this with Renoise and Live but I have no reason to doubt that I would have the same experience.
Cubase sounds like pure garbage, it kills your high freqs attacks and SSSSS sounds.
Pure crap, false warmth, buzz crunchy dark sound that I hate.
Running anything through cubase will make your stuff sound dull and lifeless.
So yeah renoise into cubase would mean pure crap.
I did tests rendering software plugs and loops and drums and midi stuff in both daws and compared, renoise has high end, mid range, better stereo image, and a beefier low end over cubase.
Cubase is garbage… Logic and sonar are better but rob you of your low end, as does ableton.
Ableton since 7 has a bright high end that cubase lacks, cubase has more bass though.
I’d like to see your results and the methodology here.
Is it too late to twix?
Do it yourself!!
I have done it a lot, all daws sound different, and the sum tests don’t test for that. I think null tests are stupid, i use my ears.
Why do daws sound different? They all use different rendering code. They all use different fx. They all color sound in a ways as well, cubase makes everything sound so soft and dark. Renoise can get nasty and mean. They all handle being over driven in different ways.
To think all code sounds the same is silly… To think that would mean that all VA analogs would sound the same and they most certainly don’t. I have used most of the daws on the market to make music with extensively. I know that i prefer the sound of renoise over all.
Back in the day if I had a lot of white on my computer monitor I would hear a faint buzz in my audio; e.g. the DOS era where everything was normally black, or that is to say, no light on a monitor that created enough heat for a Canadian winter.
Back in the day, if I dragged Winamp across the screen I would hear a giant crackle. I had to move my soundcard one slot over so it wasn’t next to the video card.
Back in the day, I would hear faint morse code in my speakers whenever wireless internet traffic would pass through my router, placed incorrectly next to my speakers.
In all cases some form of electric field was fucking with the audio path. These are real things that happened, and can always happen.
I suspect in all cases its a mix of marketing placebo, mental disorder, being high at the time, and a shitty understanding of how electrical devices interact with each other.
In terms of “bits and bytes” its all the same.
In the minuscule chance something is wrong:
No one is talking about distortion or compressor DSPs or Glitch vs Electrix here. In these cases something can indeed sound better because they do different things and people like “MORE DISTORTION!!!” or whatever.
In terms of straight up representation of audio in the digital domain, all is the same. If it isn’t it should be fixed methodologically, not psycho acoustically with subjective mumbo jumbo.
Ears aren’t tools to prove things. Solid measurements are. Noticable differences are experienced but it doesn’t always mean the audio is malformed in one or more ways.
A softer volume level doesn’t make the sound dull, only the experience.
So more high, mid and low. Isn’t that the full range? So you mean it’s louder 
So who wants to try rendering the same MIDI track in a number of sequencers using exactly the same plugs with the same settings? I only have licence for one so I can’t. Also how they handle samples internally played at differences pitches, rather than the audio once generated by a plug-in, is also quite important in a lot of cases.
Not that I currently have a listening point setup in which I think I would be able to tell the difference which some people might. Still there are scientific tests which can be done.
hahahahahaha fucking genius
to end this debate, check out this thread - https://forum.renoise.com/t/why-does-renoise-sounds-so-good/32414, the question in the 1st post and the answers in the following 2.
vV.
Ears are the best tool, and it made all the music from back in the day sound a million times better than half of the crap that comes out today, and back in the 80s they did not have null tests and stupid digital mixers Before limiters destroyed all musical dynamics.
I have made things come close to null and null.
My friends and I still did blind tests to each other and we all could hear the differences between the daws on our music.
If you have doubt, please, write a complex track and make them the same on every daw, render them all and listen to them, fuck null tests, LISTEN.