I went from cubase 3 to 6, 6.5, 7, 7.5 and have always found that there was something strange going on with the sound engine since 6. Sort of a "blurred’ sound, sort of like listening to mp3… If I check my mixes made in 6 and higher in for example foobar, the effect is gone. I have always had the feeling that there was something wrong with my speakers, preamps, studio acoustics or my ears, because I could never achieve truly professional results in my studio. As a livesound engineer I work with expensive gear, and returning to my studio always was very frustrating because of this. I tried Reaper and studio One, the sound was much better, but I always returned to Cubase for it features…
The 7.5.30 update however is a revelaton! This blurred sound is no more now, and everything works as I am used to, like with the high end live gear. Bigger resolution, far more realistic and crispy treble, and a far more focussed sound, while opening EXACTLY THE SAME Cubase file, created in 6.5…
I am pretty shure this was not the case in 7.5.20.
Again, the SAME FILE opened in 6.5 or 7.5.30 sounds TOTALY different to my ears.
I checked this with a friend musician/engineer/Cubase user in my studio, he had exactly the same experience, we both came to the conclusion that finaly someting has drasticly changed for the better…
I still have to find out if this will have effect on my rendered mixes, and how they will sound outside of the studio, but I expect that not having to work agains this blur ( because that is what you end up with, trying to fix it) will give much better results. I will post my findings on this later.
Anybody else having the same experience?
Could Steinberg maybe shine a light?
Needless to say I am thrilled with this upgrade just because of this!
I’ve used Cubase since before VST technology was born. For quite some time Cubase has used a 32-bit float engine. The algorithm to mix two signals together is probably one of the simplest bits of code there is in a DAW, it either works or it doesn’t. You would have to code in some kind of transient smearing plug to make the sound seem more blurred compared to the current update.
Do a mixdown render in both 6.5 then 7.5.3 and properly blind test yourself, see if you can spot which is which every time. If there is indeed a ‘revelation’ of a difference between the two, your accuracy should be 100%. Whilst you’re at it, post the clips up here
But I’m not gonna lie, when I opened a current project in 7.5.30 and played it, I could have sworn I heard a clarity, a crispness, an improvement that was not there before.
I’m 100% sure this was just my imagination and do not even feel compelled to do a null test.
Having said that, I did make a bootable SSD backup of my 7.5.20 build … so …
I do think it’s all in my head though. I’m sure it would null. If it doesn’t null it’s probably things like “random hall” reverb tails and the subtle differences that would prevent a full null even on the same version of Cubase.
But … I did think “this sounds better” when I played the project the first time after installing.
I think a big part of that is that expectation of improvement that goes hand in hand with Cubase versions. ie the initial release being very problematic and gradually over the course of several updates all the bugs get ironed out. So we have this inherent overly positive attitude towards a new update, so naturally it seems to sound better from that positivity.
But who knows, to play devils advocate for a moment, maybe they tweaked the internal fx like eq or something, though as someone else said it would be highly unlikely for them to make such an improvement and not make a huge song and dance about it. Unless it was correcting a bug no-one knew about, but that seems very unlikely. I very rarely use Cubases built in plugins anyways so that’s probably why I’ve noticed little to no difference in the sound of Cubase through the generations. There’s only one way to mix audio streams in 32-bit float, the correct way, which is nothing more than a simple bit of code.
recently i switched from samplitude ProX to Cubase - installed the 7.5.2-Version and tried to hear differences between these two DAWs, as Magix claims to have one of the best sounding DAWs on the market.
Well, there are tests on the internet, that show, that this claim is true, when you measure very very deep.
These measurements are very mathematical and theoretical - to me not valuable
Maybe in a big production, when tons of tracks are summed you could hear the difference.
In my case i couldn’t hear the difference. Most of the time i do narration for Documentations and commercials…so, just one track
My conclusion : No difference to my ears (i wash them every day) - neither in the last Cubase installation, nor in the actual
Cubase 7 has new EQs, it is absolutely possible that 7 sounds different to you.
From KB:
“The channel EQ in Nuendo 6 and Cubase 7 has been newly developed and is technically not the same EQ as in previous versions anymore. We have taken care to make sure that EQ settings saved in projects of previous versions are correctly translated to the new EQ to retain the same perceived sound as best as possible. However, when loading projects saved in a previous version into Nuendo 6 / Cubase 7 you may notice minor variances of the Q-Factor value for all EQ bands, especially evident when using the “Parametric I” filter. In this case the sound of the playback, dependent of the audio material on which such EQ band filters are applied, can be more or less noticeably different and may require re-adjusting the Q-Factor on affected channels.”
7.5.20 > 7.5.30 = no personal experience of sonic differences/improvements.
Haven’t even realized the EQ improvements Timo mentions. Did hardly use Cubase’ EQ before 7 (before it was instantly touchable in the mixer without opening channel editor). That said, I found the simple onboard channel EQ to be very useful and musical since I use it
