Hi quality exports sound much lower in quality compared to live playback

Cubase
1

Hi all, when I’m listening to my mix I can clearly hear the vocals, but when I’m exporting the track (either highest quality mp3 or pure WAV), it sounds much less clear, the vocals sound dull and are difficutl to disintguish. Any ideas anyone?

EDIT: I imported the WAV and FLAC in a track, disabled all Stereo Bus processing, put the corresponding fader to zero, and it sounds as crap as the export does in any media player. I can hardly hear the vocals, especially the s and other sibilants etc, it’s terrible sounding!!

2

Do you use ControlRoom and maybe have plugins on there?
Does this happen with just one project or all of them? It is not impossible that it is actually a plugin that is buggy and does something weird on render. Try disabling all plugins, render again and compare, just to exclude that possibility.

3

Thanks for taking the time to reply! No Control Room here.

I found it, but it sounds like a bug to me. When I export using ‘Realtime Export’ ticked on, it sounds great, like with live playback, when I tick it off again (I’ve neveer used realtime export in my life before), it sounds dull again and the vocals are crap.

Is this a known issue??

4

Have you tried disabling all plugins, like I wrote? Or creating a new project, import just a few audio tracks and compare the render results.
I did come across a buggy plugin though that rendered differently than realtime playback when using MIDI CCs, so that could be a possibility you should test for. Else, I never had problems with export as far as I can remember…

5

I looked in the direction you pointed me. But since I have a sh*tload of plugins on so many channels. and I suspected the vocal group channel to be the culprit, so I experimented there. One by one disabling the plugins on that group channel, rendering, listening and comparing to the original playback in Cubase. And I found the plugin that causes the issue. Thanks so much for your kind assistance! It is the (otherwise fantastic and totally free) Roth AIR plugin that apparently doesn’t handle rendering well other than real-time. Thanks!

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