Mixing to .WAV - Not getting what I hear during playback

Qwerty

Qwerty

New member
OK - using Sonar XL 2 and an Aardvark Digital Pro 2496

Got my eight or so editted tracks (all audio not midi), select them all, choose FILE-EXPORT TO AUDIO. Leaving all the checkboxes selected I then create a single stereo .WAV file.

I then open this .WAV file up in Sound Forge.

The dumped stereo .WAV file sounds nothing like the playback I hear in Sonar?

Should it?

The Sonar .HLP file says something like, "Leave all the checkboxes selected to ensure that your mixed file sounds like what you hear during playback."

Now is this a nice marketing statement which actually means that it SHOULD sound close to playback,

OR

Is is a DEFINITIVE statement which means that 100% of the time it will create a .WAV file of what I am hearing?

Thanks in advance!

Q.
 
Yup, should sound just like your playback. What differences are you hearing between the wave and Sonar playback?
 
D'oh!

The playback from Sonar is at quite a hot level - output meter well into the yellow and I can hear the pan settings that I have created.

The mixed file itself has it's highest peak just over -6dB when viewed in Sound Forge, little or no preservation of my pan settings.
 
Fixed It!!

OK - I've worked it out..... Over-zealous use of the Track Manager

I had changed my display so that only the "active" tracks were being displayed. This meant that I had hidden the source snare, kick, tom, cymbal etc individual tracks from the main display, after I had created a drum sub-mix.

The thing that I had then forgotten to do was to MUTE the individual source tracks - so when I was mixing down to a stereo file I was mixing the individual instruments, my mixed drum track AND the individual drums.......

The weird thing that meant I didn't pick this the first time through was what it sounded like. Specifically, I would have expected that having two drum tracks would have doubled the apparent loudness of their sound.

In fact, the opposite was true - the drum sound, particularly cymbals, were reduced in the resulting file.

I guess this is wave dispersion in action, (if I can remember all those physics lessons where I was memorising chord positions.....), the two waves being identical cancel each other out so the only thing left for me to hear were the differences between the two sounds - effectively just the slight reverb and delay I had added to a couple of the drums.

Does this make sense?

Thanks for all your help!

Q.
 
..... the two waves being identical cancel each other out so the only thing left for me to hear were the differences between the two sounds ....

If they were slightly out of phase (or time) they would tend to be comb filtered. Maybe they get inverted and cancel out.
I know if I had the same signals on the main mix and B-mix at the same time on the Mackie (analog) they got way thin.
Wayne
 
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