I guess he found out it was just something in his setup?
It seemed to me that he was just here to promote Pro Tools and rubbish Nuendo/Cubase. Not once did he actually describe what the ‘difference’ was that he was supposedly hearing or provide actual copies of the recorded waveforms between his Pro Tools and Nuendo which would pretty accurately show even slight differences in the waveform therefore the recorded signal.
I’ve noticed a similar problem in Wavelab 11 Pro mastering with it for years but when re-recording monitored signal via “external FX” from the montage, playback is noticibly (but descretely) duller. I then have to run another EQ in the final phase to correct this issue for output every time. Very annoying and time consuming! Below is a frequency analysis of the same point of each song, pink = monitored, red = recorded file playback. Notice the red (recorded) wave is constantly less amplitude anywhere but at the peaks, sometimes down by 4db. That’s what I’m having to eq after recording in order to correct. I assume this is what the OP was dealing with in Nuendo..?
This topic caught my interest, so I ran a quick test.
I played some music on my computer. Using my RME Fireface 802, I can route all software outputs (i.e., the music player’s output and the DAW’s output) back as inputs via a loopback and record them using RME’s own DigiCheck software, independently of the DAW.
So my setup was:
- Music is playing and is recorded as a reference via DigiCheck (“Original”)
- The music is present as an input on an audio track in Nuendo; Track Monitor is enabled, and this signal (i.e., what is currently being monitored in Nuendo) is also recorded via DigiCheck (“Track Monitor”)
- Nuendo records the music on the audio track (“DAW Recording”)
- No plugins, all faders at 0, empty project
- After recording, I exported the recorded audio (“Export”) to compare it with the original and all other files, and I also recorded the DAW playback (“DAW Playback”) once via DigiCheck
I then performed a null test:
There are no audible results, but slight measurable differences.
Original audio vs. track monitor shows noise at approx. -102 dB RMS (approx. -92 dB peak):
The original audio versus the audio recorded by Nuendo still shows activity at the bit level, but otherwise no measurable signal remains (this could also be caused by DigiCheck doing some stuff to the Audiofile that Nuendo doesn’t):
The recorded audio versus DAW playback again shows -102 dB RMS:
The exported audio file and the recorded audio file are again different at the bit level, but there is no longer a measurable signal:
To test my setup, I imported a random sample for comparison, and you can see that the null test works with it:
So apparently, the DAW playback/Input Monitoring seems to be slightly different from the original/recorded/exported audio, but I doubt that it’s audible and the differences will only add up to minimal differences in the audio files. For example, when comparing the exported file and the DAW playback, I could only find one value in the statistics that differed slightly.
EDIT: I did the same test with Ableton and got similar results, the difference between the monitored signal and the original audio is even a little bigger (around -97db RMS).
Something else must be wrong with your setup. I use external FX daily and can null the results.
Record the residuum and normalize the result to hear it. I bet this is more or less white noise, or maybe the remnants of noise-shaped dither that got applied somewhere along the route. This won’t cancel-out due to its random nature.
Yes, true, I also suspect it’s just dithering or something like that. I’ll export it in normalized form when I have time.