Does hardware have any affect on the quality of a bounce?

[Kiwi]

Does not compute. If you are transfering files from one computer to another, and using Protools on both, then what has hardware got to do with it? The only problems I would expect would be if you forgot to render everything to audio and didn't have essential plugins on your home machine.

On the other hand - if you are processing in the audio domain and using your Saffire converters, these may not be as good as the converters in the fairly nice studio.

What exactly do you want to do?

I would suggest if you need to use any analog hardware, do it at the studio and use their converters, and just take home a project with rendered audio files that you can work with ITB.

[musichascolors]

Yup thought so


I know it's fairly obvious, I just had to be "sure"

[James Lehmann]

For a software bounce there's obviously no difference.

But just to confuse things... there is probably another way you could bounce, that some folks do use.

You could, if you wanted to, decide that you prefer the sound of the summing bus of your interface (rather than Pro-Tools) and bounce using this. I'm not too familiar with the Focusrite boxes, but Metric Halo users do this all the time - bouncing via a digital loopback thus ensuring that the MH box is doing the summing and not your DAW.

I assume something like this would be technically possible with the Focusrite, although whether it would be subjectively better or worse than an internal Pro-Tools bounce I can't honestly say. All I can say is that in my experience the summing bus of my Metric Halo is smoother and appears to leave more space around the mix than summing in Logic, so I always use this method on mission-critical mixes.