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Has anyone here noticed a difference in playback quality between different programs? I recently did a test of opening the same audio file in peak 1.62 and Logic 4.7.3 and comparing what it sounded like. There was a subtle but inmistakable improvement in the Logic playback over Peak's playback. Invdividual sounds were sharper, clearer, more distinct from each other. Can anyone explain why this is, or help me figure it out? I have always assumed that digital sound is digital sound, and if I'm using the same hardware, the software used for simple things like playback shouldn't make a difference.

I've noticed a similar difference between Logic and Reason. Logic just seems to sound better than Reason (it could just be that it's louder, though). Is there any grounds to this? Is it possible that using certain software will degrade the quality of the audio files I'm working with in the same way that, say, using cheap cables with hardware would?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Also, any recommendations of books and/or web sites would be great.

thanks

[Francois Déchery]

Yep!

I must told you that tour ears ARE FINES!

YES, apps sound diferents when playing the same audio sample....

Professional ones like protools (properly setup, of cource) produce predictable results, as you should expect from the digital world.
But some (like Cubssa for example) can produce really different results, depending the card you use, your setting, your tempo, your CPU use, etc...) No manufacturers will tell you about that, but there are good ways to do ndigital, and others cheaper/fasters......

Never trust the papers, trust your ears!

We are just in the jurrasic digital age ;-))))))))))

Interesting. Thanks for the reply. You wouldn't happen to know of any web sites or articles dealing with this sort of thing, would you?

thanks

-MOrgan

[Francois Déchery]

i don't remember to read such article on the web (but it should exists).

But if you carefully teach yourself about all the issue involved with the digital world (jitter, anti-alising, quantization, sampling frequencie, clock source, etc....) you will fastly understand that only seriously made gear can correctly reproduce digital sound.

Simply adding a good clock source (www.aardvarkaudio.com make some serious ones) to your converters can improves the sound in an amazing way. Nothing magic here, just true digital, the way it should be.

[nleonard]

Logic uses 32 bit processing on the audio files once they are on your hard drive. This is even more noticable when you add effects or edit the waveforms in the editor. Other programs may only have 16 bit. Even Logic has a checkbox that allows for 20/24 bit internal processing.

[DavidK]

a hight internal resolution helps to avoid multiple calculation troubles.
IE when you daisy chain several plug-ins.

The right solution is to use -floating point- resolution instead of fixed resolution... but most mac apps still don't use it.