Message 12/18
Date: 25-Nov-04 @ 08:11 AM Edit: 25-Nov-04 | 08:14 AM -
RE: Reason's Audio Quality
Thing is, I did mixdowns/audio exports for the same song from Reason and SX as well (via rewire), and they sounded very similar.
Two things. First, reason's sound generators are designed in pretty functional way compared to "real HW", or VST plugs like ALbino, FM7 etc. While the later usually has several stages of FX after the actual synthesizer engine (reverb, chorus, phaser, distortion, whatever) to make its sound as full (phat, complex, etc) as it can, Reason's synthesizers (Subtractor, Malstrom) are just stop at the output filter. So to be able to compare, one has to add some FX, or even chain a subtractor into a maelstrom. Even as the gui tries to resemble to normal hardware, they should better be used as building blocks in synthedit or reaktor.
Also, the mixer in reason is really a different animal than for eg. logic's mixer. It might sound weaker for the individual channels, but in return you can turn up the volume on individual channels as hard as you need without clipping (provided that master volume is not se too high). This way the mixer "divides" the headroom provided by the 64 bit calculation between the channels in a more dynamic way, which will probably not sound better or worse, its just easier to use.
cheers,
Welder (Rags)
ps: surely the troubles with early protools implementations (and ppl. overreacting them) caused many to think that like with analog, there can be fundamental differences between digital audio and digital audio, but I belive today, there can be not much difference between software and software, as far as mixing is concerned, because you really have to fuck things up to lose fidelity with 64 bit or even 64 bit floating point calculations, which are the standards today (sx, nuendo, reason, traction, live, fruity).