Nino

Hello all,

I expect you're all thinking, 'Oh God! Not another Cubase sounds different to Logic thread', but infact this is not about that at all.

I decided to conduct a little controlled experiment to compare the summing of different DAWs. Currently I have only done three but I hope to do more in the coming days. I am also sure it does not tick alot of other technical boxes but it seemed the most simple and reliable test at the time.

My aim was to see if there were any differences between DAWs when summing more and more wav files. My objective to achive this was to create a 10 second 44.1/16 1Khz sine wav file at -10dBFS (peak) as a control file. I would then create 5 mono tracks and one stereo master fader in the selected DAW and import the control file onto each mono track, muting them. I then took a peak reading from the stereo master with one track un-muted, then two, then three, etc. The idea was to compare the relative master levels between DAWs at each stage. I also reset the levels at all points during the process to cancel any clips that may have occured during un-muting of tracks.

I'm not qualified enough to make judgements as to the relative differences between each. I do hope that people will be able to make informed judgements as to the either the most 'realistic' (compared to good analogue summing), the most 'innacurate', or the most 'accurate' of the DAWs summing.

Here are the results:

Pro Tools 7.1 (MBox 1)
1 track = -12.5
2 tracks = -6.5
3 tracks = -3
4 tracks = -0.5
5 tracks = +0 (unable to obtain exact dB)

Logic 7.1 (MBox 1)
1 track = -10
2 tracks = -3.9
3 tracks = -0.4
4 tracks = +2
5 tracks = +3.9

Audacity (MBox 1)
1 track = -10
2 tracks = -4
3 tracks = -0.5
4 tracks = 0
5 tracks = +0 (unable to obtain exact dB)

I hope to include Cubase 4 shortly.

I would be glad to hear your thoughts.
Nino