My tracks loose quality after the Mixdown

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Maddox

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I use Sonar and Reason via Rewire. Before the mixdown, the tracks coming from Reason sounds nice together with the tracks from Sonar.

After I bounce the Reason tracks and open it in a new track in Sonar, they still sounds great, but after the mixdown to a wave file they sound muffled, specially the drums.

I noticed that if I export the tracks from Reason, one by one, to individual midi files, and open each one in a new midi track in Sonar, and then bounce it, it sounds a little better, but it still sounds stifled.

You guys have any idea why, and what can I do, please.

Note: I export the Reason tracks at 24 bit. Then during the Sonar mixdown, I have tried it with 24 and 32 bits, but the result is the same muffled mixdown.

I don't know what dithering is, but i've tried with no dithering, triangular, power-3, and got no improvement.

thanks
 
What you hear when you listen to a mix is what you should hear when you do a bounce. There should be no change. I can't think of a reason why they would sound muffled. The faint possibility is that there is something on the master bus on mixdown (e.g. an EQ or a limiter or something) that is not active during playback of the mix . . . but I'm clutching at straws.
 
What are you listening to the final wav in? Check there's no eq setting on the player your using that's altering the sound. If your putting the track back into a DAW like the guy above me said check there's no processing on the master bus, also are you putting the wav file into a stereo not mono track?, I made that mistake a while back.
 
gecko zzed said:
The faint possibility is that there is something on the master bus on mixdown (e.g. an EQ or a limiter or something) that is not active during playback of the mix . . .
Click to expand...

No, there is nothing on the master bus. However, there is something i forgot to say: i tried to correct this muffling by importing the wav file from Reason into Sonar, then eq'ing this new wav file, boosting the lows and highs, and a little bit in the mids, and, in order to prevent clipping i add a limiter too. This helps a little, but it is not the same quality i got during playback.

But i add nothing to the Master bus.

benage said:
What are you listening to the final wav in? Check there's no eq setting on the player your using that's altering the sound.
Click to expand...

Winamp. And on different stereo players. But there's nothing altering it.

benage said:
also are you putting the wav file into a stereo not mono track?
Click to expand...

I'm sorry, i didn't understand. You mean, if the audio track in sonar to wich i import the Reason wav file is mono or stereo ? i didn't quite get it, sorry.
 
Maddox said:
No, there is nothing on the master bus. However, there is something i forgot to say: i tried to correct this muffling by importing the wav file from Reason into Sonar, then eq'ing this new wav file, boosting the lows and highs, and a little bit in the mids, and, in order to prevent clipping i add a limiter too. This helps a little, but it is not the same quality i got during playback.

But i add nothing to the Master bus.



Winamp. And on different stereo players. But there's nothing altering it.



I'm sorry, i didn't understand. You mean, if the audio track in sonar to wich i import the Reason wav file is mono or stereo ? i didn't quite get it, sorry.
Click to expand...


What benage is saying is you can export the audio file as a stereo file (creating a left-right mix), or you can export as mono, which means the computer/software sums the audio into.....mono, I can't really describe mono? NOT STEREO lol. When you sum the tracks to mono, there can be a huge loss of the stereo quality which in turn, depending on your mixing skills, can sound muddy/bad. Check the options and make sure you are not exporting as a mono audio file.
 
I don't know sonar as I use Logic, but there should be a button to convert an audio track to stereo, if a track has a pan control it's mono, you can move that single sound source from left to right, where as a stereo track has both left and right information already given to it by your stereo wav file so no pan control, but if you put a stereo file in a mono track it sums it to mono (in logic anyway, which alters the balance of intruments, If it still sounds weird on other players though it's not gunna be that.
 
Sorry cross post! Yeah he might have bounced it as a mono file, could be that.
 
How are you listening to your stereo mix once it's all been mixed etc?
It sounds to me that you're somehow listening in mono.

Do you do the final mix-down in real time?
If you're definately not listening in mono, I would listen to the mix down as it happens to see if it's 'muffled' there.

If it's not, you've probably missed something in the way you listen back to the stereo, either a plugin or built in eq depending on what you audition on. Try listening to the stereo on something else.
 
When I first started recording I didn't understand the stereo/mono bounce and had the same problem trying to figure out why my tracks were muffled and sounded different once I bounced them.

It could also be the fact that you are listening on different systems. Maybe the mix isn't quite right or it isn't mastered yet and that could be something to consider. Also, what is your monitor situation? If you're using computer speakers it will sound way different on other speakers...this is the art of mixing and mastering...to get your final tracks to sound similar on all different systems. Inexperienced engineers will almost always end up with muffled mixes when going between different systems...it's part of the learning curve.

so it could be 1) mono bounce, 2) just the nature of mixing - go back and work it a little more.
 
Dithering just adds a bit of very low level noise to hide quantization error caused by bit truncation from 24 to 16. It really only affects the very lowest levels of the signal.

You're not exporting directly to mp3 are you? Mp3 files degrade the audio quality. You should be exporting to stereo 16 bit 44.1kHz wave.
 
Please, help me out here.

I know I select Stereo at the screen that pops after I go to File - Save As - Wave File.

So, what am I missing ?

Should I bounce all the tracks to a new stereo track before saving it to a wave file ?
 
At this point I think we need to hear something. Can you post an example of the tracks bounced from Reason, then a version bounced from Sonar?
 
yeah, we need to hear, but I'll bet it's just the nature of mixing...sounds great on whatever it was mixed on and not so great on other things.
 
How are you listening to the stereo mix???
I think there could be something that's been missed in your replay signal chain.
 
Maddox said:
I use Sonar and Reason via Rewire. Before the mixdown, the tracks coming from Reason sounds nice together with the tracks from Sonar.

After I bounce the Reason tracks and open it in a new track in Sonar, they still sounds great, but after the mixdown to a wave file they sound muffled, specially the drums.

I noticed that if I export the tracks from Reason, one by one, to individual midi files, and open each one in a new midi track in Sonar, and then bounce it, it sounds a little better, but it still sounds stifled.

You guys have any idea why, and what can I do, please.

Note: I export the Reason tracks at 24 bit. Then during the Sonar mixdown, I have tried it with 24 and 32 bits, but the result is the same muffled mixdown.

I don't know what dithering is, but i've tried with no dithering, triangular, power-3, and got no improvement.

thanks
Click to expand...

Something you can try is to bounce things down in stems. Drums, bass, guitar, etc. Don't change any levels, just solo out the instrument and its FX tracks (if any). Staying at your current bit rate and sample rate are also important.

Another thing is to check is stereo interleaving (the DAW's ability to join stereo tracks together upon mixdown.) I personally save my stereo interleaving for the mastering stage. So in other words, try exporting your mix as a multiple mono file (giving you independant left and right tracks).

If you have a mastering program that's able to open multi mono files (making them stereo once imported) then try saving it stereo from there. Pro Tools, for example, is relentlessly terrible at summing digitally (to my ears), so I always opt to save my stereo interleaving for the mastering engineer. In my experience, it's the best possible way to preserve the stereo image in a digital realm.
 
LeeRosario said:
Pro Tools, for example, is relentlessly terrible at summing digitally (to my ears), so I always opt to save my stereo interleaving for the mastering engineer. In my experience, it's the best possible way to preserve the stereo image in a digital realm.
Click to expand...

Interleaving and summing are drastically different things. Interleaving should have no effect on the audio information or sound quality.
 
Right. I didn't mean to imply they where the same thing.

However I disagree that there is no effect from results I've been hearing recently. It used to be that I bounced my mixes down in pro tools (stereo interleaved at the original 24 bits/48khz sample rate) and I would hear the absolute same result as described here. Muddy mixes different from my mix session. It was frustrating, but I was also into mastering my own stuff at the time, so I just tried to compensate as best I could.

These days, I'm into recording my mixes into a stereo audio track and taking the Left and Right channel data straight from the PT session and loading it into Cubase 5 (when doing in house mastering), bypassing the extra step altogether. I can't explain what I'm hearing, but it just sounds better. Maybe it's paranoia. The improvements are mostly in the center image, everything is clean and preserved. I then took it as far as doing three separate listening tests (all mastered the same):

1) Export from protools (interleaved) then mastered/exported in Cubase
2) Left and Right Channel PT data (multi mono) exported down/mastered in Cubase
3) Left and Right channel PT data (multi mono) exported /mastered in Cubase (multi mono export) and then interleaved using Wavelab 6.

All three sounded totally different using the same mix. The best combination to my ears was the multi-mono/cubase mastering/interleaving combination. I've even had mastering engineers request that I do not interleave the files before I send them, and they all have perfectly capable ways of importing interleaved data.

Normally I have a pretty clear idea of explaining things in audio, but this is one of those things that blows my mind in the way the samplerate wars and the digital vs analog summing wars does. I suppose it just ended up being an ear thing, but I do believe there is a difference there somehow.


Another thing could be in the way Reason interfaces with Sonar. However, I'm not a programmer or a Sonar user, so I can't really speak from experience there.
 
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LeeRosario said:
Right. I didn't mean to imply they where the same thing.

However I disagree that there is no effect from results I've been hearing recently.
Click to expand...

Well, you've done listening tests and I haven't so the preponderance of evidence suggests it does make a difference.
 
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