Myself I feel that I’ve said what I have to say and that the whole discussion has taken far too much focus from the original question “Is Nuendo 10 a good upgrade?”
And to the question, my answer is hands down “best upgrade to date and it’s making me very happy, although with some room for improvements”.
I’ll write a reply to OP strictly regarding his or her original question after this one and then I feel I’m pretty much good here. Noone brings anything but opinions to the table and I’ve already repeated myself enough already. Will still keep an eye on the thread of course, but as it is now it’s not a very meaningful thread for me to participate further in.
I’ve always kinda wondered why developers never ever join these discussions themselves, they are the only ones who could truly give the full facts here, but this thread very much tells that it’s probably because people are really poor at handling the concept of “acceptable compromises”. And that applies to a lot of discussions regretfully.
But as a reply to your post here, I do this for a living, so I put my ears to the test every day. As mentioned before, I believe that this is first and foremost an issue with the realtime playback engine, so to truly test this you’ll have to record the output from the live project and compare from there. The effects seems more obvious the more you’ll have to process the material, a great example was a few years ago when I had a running gig mixing theatrical trailers for two major studios. For the most part all went on very well with virtually never any real issues whatsoever, except a few times when the material I got had been ripped from a really uncooperative source. It sounded good in VLC, Mediaplayer, and Wavelab, but it was completely impossible to work with in Nuendo 7. It was all mud. It was pretty obvious that this was just a problem with the sound happening to be too much in the…let’s call it “dead spot” in lack of a better word, but it was a very tangible effect of this all.
Here though that wasn’t much of a problem. If I remember correctly it was already nicely processed so I just let it sit as is in the mix and it came out just fine on the other end. Which also tells me the issue is not in the lower levels.