Finally moved from older DAWs to Pro Tools, and boy am I impressed! Anyone know why?

B

biffbiffson

New member
I grew up using Acoustica and CoolEdit/Adobe Audition and when Ableton Live 9 came out, I gave it a go and was definitely blown away by the far newer quality stock VSTs and workflow, but I recently got a MacBook and a friend let me use Pro Tools 9 on it, and boy was I shocked.

The actually quality of just raw recordings going into the DAW just sounded better. I used to run the other DAWs on 96 kHz, 24-bit, and I've been using Pro Tools on 44.1 kHz, 24-bit and I like these tracks better (is this maybe why it sounds better? is 96 kHz maybe stretching the audio quality too far or something?). Everything in my line up is exactly the same: Alesis MultiMix 8, same instruments, same mikes and same levels, etc.

What's funny is that Pro Tools 9 is nearly 4 years old, and even though Ableton Live 9 came out this year, I wasn't as blown away by the DAW sound upgrade as I was by PT9.

Is this some kind of placebo effect?

Does anyone know if there's a programming reason in the background that is making me flip my wig? Just wondering.

Sincerely,
Curious Convert
 
Hi there,
Honestly, I think it's a placebo effect.
When dealing with completely raw tracks there shouldn't be any difference between one DAW and another.
Even if there are subtle differences, I very much doubt they'd be audible.

It's a a debate that's flattened quite often.
Now, if you're getting into using plugins or whatever there's a good chance that ProTools tools are better, or work better for you, than the ones from other DAWS.

Also, if you're judging the DAWS on what you hear live (while you're recording), you could be comparing the results of different latencies.
That could convince you that one DAW sounds better than the other, but only whilst recording.
Once you hit stop and play everything back it should sound the same in any DAW.

Either way, good to hear you're happy with your new toy. :)

I wouldn't worry about PT9 being 4 years old.
I doubt anyone would know the difference between 9,10 or 11, apart from the subtle new features that come with each version.
 
I don't know anything about Acoustica. Cool Edit is quite an old version and I can imagine ANYTHING would be better than that. Ableton is a different kind of DAW with a slightly skewed purpose towards dubstepping. I've only ever looked at it once, but I got the impression it wasn't like the mainstream DAW's. Which leads to see why you are so impressed with PT. :)

The 96khz/44.1khz debate has died off a bit around here. Sure, it's possible to hear a difference, but in the home recording environment, there are so many other factors affecting the quality of the recording that you won't notice the difference; like the Alesis Multimx. It probably has questionable converters with tons of timing clock jitter, but in a poor room with average speakers, you won't hear the difference. It mostly comes down to psycho-acoustics. It sounds better because you think it should sound better.
 
Thanks for all the input!

As for CoolEdit, I had been using Adobe Audition 3 until Ableton Live 9 came out. Steenamaroo, that's what I found interesting. I'm not sure if there's any technical reason for 44.1 khz to ever sound better than 96 khz, so I was just listing all the variables.

I will leave it at placebo effect!
 
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