Renoise And Other Daws Audio Engines

General Discussion
40

They definitely sound different to me, too. Looking at and listening to each waveform, it’s immediately obvious that the snare and vocal elements (and possibly other elements) in the Logic render are substantially louder than in the Cubase render, so they are certainly not mixed the same way at all and therefore this is not a fair comparison.

For what it’s worth, the kick drum in each render is all but identical. So much so that doing an inverted mix-paste causes the kick to cancel/null itself out to silence.

Were these files both genuinely rendered from their respective DAW, or did you simply create these differences to demonstrate roughly how it sounded to you at the time?

41

I can’t tell if you’re sarcastic, but I think name-calling like that is really pathetic.
I mean, this thread grew from nothing in day or so…I checked the forum this morning, saw the subject and did the facepalm thing - but I was pretty confident that someone would point out previous thread on the subject. Instead, it became a shitstorm where most people (team members included) possess all the knowledge, but doesn’t give the original poster a break. C’mon guys!!

42

I rendered them the same. No joke, I just think logic handles fx send buses better or something and that is why some things sounded different in the end. Cubase sounds duller on high freqs, its not a louder thing at all, listen to the guitars, its not a louder thing, there is more detail in the mids and high freqs. The snare is way more detailed and you can clearly hear the gated verb fx, and on cubase you don’t hear it as well, the detail in the tails are lost.

Cubase, the bass and kick sound way more full, but the mids and highs on logic shine and have way more attack. With cubase there is this muddy blanket on everything. Working in logic everything got brighter and more detailed.

I notice that renoise has more bass than logic but all of the mid and high freq detail of logic.

when I load up cubase with the vsts and start working with the soft synths it sound so dull and uninspiring. Load up renoise with the same plugs and the sounds are alive, crisp, cutting and not dull and inspiring. This is why I left cubase over all and came to renoise.

Renoise and cubase do not sound the same to me. Not at all, not when working in it, and not when summing things. Renoise is godly, cubase robs you of highs and pumps the low and sounds dull.

43

Something only a fatty four eyes would say…

In my mind the word dunce is some person who’s sent to the corner in a triangular hat to sit alone while the rest of the class carries on.

I wasn’t trying to say that the original poster didn’t have legitimate grievance, rather that the grievances go unresolved and the poster is put in the corner in the process. This happens because these types of threads start and derail the way they do.

We need:

  • A scope: What are we comparing?
  • A process: Give steps on how a user can reproduce the results.
  • Proof: Provide files we can look at.

I give:

  • Trolling
  • Troll-lol-lol-ing
  • They are all twix!
  • Love a bad name

I see hexfix93 is providing files. That’s awesome! I wasn’t singling hexfix93 out. We as a community just so happen to have seen this thread several dozen times from dozens of different vague starting points. Being on the team doesn’t mean you can’t have an opinion. If a user wants a more official answer then there’s always support email which will never get trolled.

The forum is an entirely different beast.

44

Err… are you guys talking about me or hexfix93 ? Because all I did was asking a question then apologize for it considering it’s been discussed before…

45

Guys, guys, guys! Why don’t we harness all of this energy into the Keith303 Remix contest, huh? ;)

46

Me? I’m talking about years of the same thread. Not a person.

All these threads have ended up like this. The first few were constructive mixed with terrible. Now they go nowhere. You just happen to have got caught on a bad day?

47

Right, this is my opinion. It is not a scientific test. The fx have an effect on how you write as well, logics fx kick the crap out of cubases fx, I even like renoise’s fx more than cubase’s. I don’t mean to offend anyone here.

48

I can understand that. What I don’t understand is why people deliberately read and reply to threads that are upsetting them but whatever…

Thanks for the honest, constructive replies.

49

I’m not saying that it’s only a loudness thing, but the snare and other elements are definitely louder in the Logic render. It’s not simply a matter of them sounding clearer or more detailed somehow; they are absolutely louder to start with, no question. For whatever reason, those elements are louder in Logic than they are in Cubase. It could be a slightly different setting for send tracks, or a different gain curve, or who knows what. Whatever it is, you probably need to compensate for this difference in gain before a proper test can be done.

If you’re processing those particular elements (snare, vocal, guitar, etc) through additional effects, then the fact that these elements are louder (for whatever reason) can easily have a knock-on effect through the DSP chain. A louder input signal means that more of the frequencies are being sent through any filters, eqs, reverbs, distortions, or anything else you have on there. This louder input could easily produce a final processed sound that has more exaggerated/boosted frequencies in Logic, and this could manifest itself as sounding more crisp or clear or whatever.

I don’t have Cubase or Logic here myself to really test this with, so I can only base my assumptions on the files that you have provided. But I can tell you this for sure: the kick and bass in both renders are essentially identical. They have the same gain level, same frequency response, etc. There is no appreciable difference.

The easiest way to prove this is by inverting one of the renders and then mix-pasting it back onto the other render. Whatever remains after this process is the difference between the two signals. The idea is that two perfectly identical signals will ideally cancel out to complete silence, whereas two slightly different signals will result in some subtle residual noise, and two very different signals will result in much more dramatic residual sounds.

When I apply this process to the two renders that you have provided, I get the following result:
vacdecubaselogicdifference.wav

You can listen to it yourself and see that the kick and bass sounds have obviously disappeared completely, leaving only the snare and other elements remaining. This is pretty conclusively evidence that the kick and bass sounds in each render are basically identical. Whatever differences you were hearing with the kick and bass must be related to the live playback in each DAW, since those differences are not actually showing up in the final rendered output.

If the Cubase rendered kick and bass sounds were physically more full, or had more bass, or were different in any other way, then this would be immediately obviously after the mix-paste process. There would be a pretty obvious amount of residual sound left over from the process, just like there is some residual sound from the snare and other elemtns that were different in each render.

50

Stick with your null stuff, I’ll stick with my ears. I write music and the daws inspire me in different ways because of how they sound. I don’t trust any null tests, because I can hear differences even when files have nulled, and I am not the only one who says this either.

What that null is telling me is that the stuff in the mid range and high end is missing in cubase and that is why it doesn’t null, but the low end does :) That is probably why my ears think cubase has more bass, because there are no high freqs :) LOL

51

So in the samples you provided you used different fx (one time the ones of logic and one time those of cubase)???

52

Look man, I think it’s awesome that you love and prefer working with Renoise! You’ve got no arguments from me there!

I personally don’t give two shits about Cubase or Logic, but nevertheless I think it’s important to get the facts straight here, because the same stuff potentially applies to Renoise itself.

If you wanna end this thing once and for all, then just take 2 or 3 clean audio files and bring them into Cubase and Logic (and Renoise if you like!). Set up each DAW in the same way with each audio file on its own track and no additional processing. No effects or filters or send busses or anything else, just clean tracks being mixed together. Bounce the final mixes down to .WAV and then post the results.

If Cubase is truly fucking up the bass and highs, or there is any other type of weird behaviour going on with any of the DAWs, then it will be easy to spot with such a simple test.

Otherwise, let’s just fuckin agree to disagree :)

53

Hey man, I’m cool, you can disagree. As I said, these are my opinions. Everyone sees the world from their own eyes, ideas, logics and senses.

More than anything I was responding to this thread where someone was stating that their friend said renoise sounded bad, and it does if you run it into cubase, because everything sounds bad in cubase in my opinion.

And in my renderings, i didn’t use any cubase or logic fx, it was all done with analog hardware recorded into the daw as audio files, i used a ksp8, distressors etc all outboard at the time. This was just a rendering test of audio files, i did rout things through buses in the daw though.

54

55

Laugh all you want. I don’t care what people think, I often wonder why I even bother posting my opinions :) I try to defend renoise and all, and it turns into this. Oh well. I’m gone.

L8s

56

Hopefully, that’s the end of it. I’m starting to feel bad about it all <_<

:D

57

im with hexfix93.

and thats not because i think i can hear the difference but because ive learned there is one/few.
there are so many myths out there. its fascinating. and we talk about sampling here, right?!
true, i mean absolute- true sampling (recreation of the sound) isnt possible.
not with our hobby music- technology nowadays. especially not with our comput0rs.
its just the most possible way of doing so.
in the end its 1 and 0, the binary system not the true organic sound that exist in nature.

i know thats not quite the point here, but bear in mind every music app has its own math
and its own structure of dealing with the recorded sound or simply the method of recording.
i think as much as the topic of “daw audio engine blabla” is discussed
to death it should be the clarification of those ppl that could count as audiophiles.

in the end its the music for me, not the single sound; too many already out-there.
and the tool i want to create music with is a tracker… not a digital audio workstation.

lesser daw more map.

58

Bad code can degrade audio, bits get dropped with digital processing, because computers cannot divide perfectly with out error. This is why if the audio engine is over processing for example, depending on how it handles the signal chain, the more it does, the more data loss occurs. To think that all audio apps handle audio the exact same way is delusional. If the gui is intensive this can take away from the audio, there are even settings in cubase for more processing to audio or midi. Cubase used to have tight midi, those days are long gone, its a pure jittery mess now for outboard gear. Saw Studio colors the sound in a great way. Cubase fails and colors the sound in a bad way. New Ableton, Sonar and Logic tend to sound more real and neutral. I have written so many songs in cubase, did an lp in logic, and a few remixes in sonar. Worked with renoise since it came out. I think my experience in selling music with these apps actually means something. I’m not paid by any of these companies. I am just telling people my opinions.

If the code is written poorly for summing YES IT CAN FUCK THE SOUND UP. IF anyone can mess it up it’s steinberg. That bloated piece of crap app knows nothing of efficiency when it comes to code. You would think with the new processors and memory, they could get their midi code better and their audio engine to STOP STRIPPING OUT THE HIGH END ON THE SOUNDS!

I know that digital mixers sound different, not just because of the front end, the o1v, vs others, they all sound different. They sum different. The sony boards with the oxford plugs are boss! Its not all the same, its not in hardware, and its not in software. This is why waves sounds nothing like duende or oxford. Digital code can be written well, or bad, or ok, like anything. Same goes for the mixer engine in any DAW.

59

Cubase sucks because i can’t make good music with it. Reason sucks even more. Renoise is the shit, that is a sientific fact i think.