Do different DAWs sound different?

[Gswitz]

2 hours ago, OutrageProductions said:

Well... there's your problem... gotta be really difficult to record audio directly to a Web Portal for a Forum. LOL!!!

Supposed to be hard disk recorder. 

[Starship Krupa]

9 hours ago, Bapu said:

IMO the Mixbus mix was "better" but purely subjective.

Yeah, subjective. That's a thing where our eyes get into the act. I'm waiting for people to start claiming that Sonar sounds more "clinical" than CbB.

I'm starting to wonder if it's even possible for our perception to eliminate how the program looks from the equation. If the UI looks "cozy," which the Mixbus UI does, how could the listening experience not be more pleasant?

I don't do blind A/B tests, but I do close my eyes and focus hard on what's in the cans. And I do always use cans when I'm scrutinizing things like this. I have a long history with it. When I was a teenager back in the early 80's, I had my girlfriend help me with blind testing (not double, she knew what she was playing) different brands of cassette tape.

I recorded the same Steely Dan song from vinyl to 3 different cassettes. Then I put on my Sennheisers and asked her to swap the tapes in and out at random when I said "switch." I remember it was Maxell vs. TDK vs. Ampex Grand Master. I had always preferred Maxell, but most other hi fi heads around me said that they liked TDK. Ampex came out with this Grand Master tape, and I was all excited about it. Tape from a California company rather than a Japanese one? The company who brought tape recording to the US? Bing Crosby, Les Paul, et al?

The results: TDK on top, followed by Maxell, followed by Ampex. 😥

What I noticed was the way cymbals sounded. Those amazing drum captures that Roger Nichols got back then were so revealing. On the TDK, they sounded clearer, on the other ones there was a sort of pfft in the very high end, like they just couldn't quite record it. Now I believe that my Akai deck may have been biased with the TDK, thus giving it an "unfair" advantage. Whatever the reason, from that day forward it was all TDK.

Even with my 64 year old rocker ears, when I listen, I close my eyes and focus on transient reproduction, highs, reverb tails (what is it with reverb tails anyway?). Does the playback sound like it's constrained to the speakers/headphones, or does it sound like it's somehow wider?

I don't use Aja any more, my current fave audio playback music is Radiohead's "Everything in its Right Place," which has just so many little ear candy things going on. Sound snippets panned hard, reverse echo and reverb, breath noise. The more of them I can hear, the "better" I consider the playback system to be.

Best sounding Windows music player so far: JRiver, but I ain't payin' $75 for a license for a friggin' media player. It's not THAT much better than Music Bee and AIMP. It's a great program, though, the only one I know of that can host 64-bit VST3's. JRiver with Morphit or VHS or whatever was a lot of fun during my demo period. Again, I really didn't want to hear a difference, I wanted it to sound no better than my freeware ones. For heaven's sake, they're just sending ones and zeroes from the disk to the DAC, right? If I have a bias, it's a weird one.

Something I'd really like to be able to do is test digital audio streams for jitter, 'cause I think jitter may be the thing that can make a difference in audio perception. I've read whitepapers that say that humans can perceive jitter degradation in digital audio playback, and what they describe is the same thing I believe I can hear, which is dulled transients and constrained sound.

I don't lose sleep over it, but I am curious.

[Shane_B.]

3 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

I remember it was Maxell vs. TDK vs. Ampex Grand Master.

I always preferred Maxell tape. TDK used to sound dull to me like the recording was made without Dolby on, but played back with it on. I always preferred chrome over metal as well. 

I can remember going into my local music store, Record World iirc, and there was a giant rack full of every brand and type of blank cassette you could ever want. And then there was Radio Shack. I bought one of theirs, once. Lol.

I still have a few NOS Maxell UDS-II tapes never opened I bought way back in the day. The original gold label version, not the later CD version. The tape path on those were superior to anything else I tried. I still have tapes that play and sound great I made back in the 80's and 90's. 

I recently watched a YouTube video of a woman restoring an old cassette deck. I think it was an Akai. It had a manual bias control on the front panel. She did some sound tests and after adjusting the bias I couldn't hear the difference between the digital rip and the cassette playback.

[msmcleod]

16 minutes ago, Shane_B. said:

I always preferred Maxell tape. TDK used to sound dull to me like the recording was made without Dolby on, but played back with it on. I always preferred chrome over metal as well. 

I can remember going into my local music store, Record World iirc, and there was a giant rack full of every brand and type of blank cassette you could ever want. And then there was Radio Shack. I bought one of theirs, once. Lol.

I still have a few NOS Maxell UDS-II tapes never opened I bought way back in the day. The original gold label version, not the later CD version. The tape path on those were superior to anything else I tried. I still have tapes that play and sound great I made back in the 80's and 90's. 

I recently watched a YouTube video of a woman restoring an old cassette deck. I think it was an Akai. It had a manual bias control on the front panel. She did some sound tests and after adjusting the bias I couldn't hear the difference between the digital rip and the cassette playback.

I too prefer Maxell.

I recently found some old tapes in the attic from > 30 years ago that had old 4-track (Yamaha MT1X) / 8-track (Yamaha MT8X) recordings on them.

The Maxell ones (XL-II and XL-IIS) sounded like they were recorded yesterday.

The TDK ones (SA and SA-X) were unusable - warbled and muffled.  In fact, I remember having this issue with TDK just a few months after recording on them, which is the main reason I stopped using them. 

I suspect the bias is slightly different between the two as well, and the multi-trackers were more suited to the Maxells' bias.

[bmarlowe]

I have old 4-track tapes encoded with dbx (consumer grade) noise reduction. I still have the dbx hardware.  The tapes are fine I think. The problem is that probably due to capacitor aging, the playback just doesn't sound quite right.

I wish there was software for this.

 

Edited 22 hours ago by bmarlowe

[User 905133]

Have you checked the cassettes for the tape-against-the playback-head pressure pads that used the spongy foam material that melted/disintegrated over time (as opposed the the thin metal bar spring mechanism)? It's been quite a while since I opened up some cassettes, but IIRC the less expensive ones used the pad mounted on the foam method to provide the tape-to-tape head pressure.  IIRC those cases also tended to be glued closed rather than held together by screws. 

Edited 22 hours ago by User 905133
fixed typos

[Starship Krupa]

I will say that although TDK-SA sounded the best on my Akai deck, Maxell always kicked their booty as far as the transport design and construction.

The Ampex Grand Master also seemed to be lacking in that department.

[Mark Morgon-Shaw]

I had one of these. A Pioneer CTF-950 ( early 80s ). It was my Dad's originally but he never used it much so I persuaded him to let me buy it off him to use in my studio. I think I gave him £80 for it in 88  or 89

But I used TDK MA-XG cassettes with it , with the metal chassis inside the cassette case. Recorded all my original demo masters on it.  

 

[bitflipper]

That is a beautiful bit o' kit there. Does anybody even make high-end cassette decks any more?

Back in the day I was more likely to use TDK over Maxell, but only because it was a dollar less. I'd found that I got better results with cheaper tape, even though it would be decades before I knew why.

For reel tape, though, it was always Maxell because it was the only brand the sole retailer in my city sold on large reels. In the 70's they were about $80 apiece, a major investment. I still have those reels in a box here, but long ago gave away the deck (3340-S, of course) that could play them.