dcumpian
I was joking, more or less...
 

Me too Dan.

Jeff Evans
I have to say I started out listening on headphones but now have just switched to speakers.  Firstly this is poor choice of music for a comparison like this.  It is just a boring hard edged rough sounding driving rock tune and just does not lend itself to any useful comparisons.
 
When I was working for Roland a little while back selling their now defunct V Studio they gave me a stellar recording in multitrack format.  A really skilled and beautiful band playing (with head vocals too) live with tons of delicate detail. Tons of space so you could hear everything rather than this track where everybody is just slamming at once.  Boring! The Roland track was a masterclass in mic technique.  Perfect for something like this.  With no plugins used anywhere a beautiful perfect pristine mix is possible just by balancing and some panning.  Due to the raw tracks just sounding so beautiful. 
 
(Out of interest I mixed this Roland track down in 4 DAW's and got the same sound from all of them but that was with no console emulation in place though. They were Sonar, Studio One, Logic and Pro Tools. I could get near perfect nulls with any of them added and one polarity reversed and they all sounded the same. I set the faders exactly for each DAW (to whole number of dB) and only used Pan L, C and R as well with same pan laws all in place too)
 
This is how you do something like, this not the current track. The current track is very poor.  Why because now I am hearing almost the same top end on both and the stereo is wider in Mix A for some reason so what has happened there.  Mix B is almost mono.  Are they meant to be both mono?  More info needed please.  These tracks have not been matched very well for level and stereo placement.  And if they have then it does not sound like it to me.  They are not the same in loudness either, it is even more obvious on speakers. 
 
I would do the same test with the Roland recordings in Studio One vs Mixbus except I am not allowed to use these recordings though which is a bit of a shame.  I could do it and report back.
 
 

Soundwise (Alisa) did the first pass of this in SONAR of some David Glenn multitracks she had.
 
She gave me her .cwb. IIRC there was only one track that was sent to the master bus and so I sent that to a pre-master bus and then I exported all the buses after killing FXs (which was only SONAR console and tape) retaining "everything" in terms of level and panning from SONAR.
 
Then I took those non-fx stereo bus exports and laid those into a MB 32C channel. Then, on all MB channels I turned off all sends to the Main bus and sent each track to it's own bus (which in turn were sent to the main bus). In 32C I set everything to unity gain. Again, hoping to not alter the SONAR raw bus levels or pan.
 
 
Then I exported both (in stereo) to the A & B files after making some level adjustments on both tracks (in both directions). Admittedly I may not have level matched them perfectly but someone said here they only had to adjust one by .6db. So it seems to me that I was "pretty close" 
 
I'm sorry you don''t like the approach but in the OP I clearly stated:
"Important to note both versions are devoid of any extra FXs such as compression, eq & reverb. IOW it's not a mix but a comparison of the two "console" versions attempting to be close to equal as possible."
 
Although your complaint is valid it was not the intent to find that perfect mix (please all of the people all of the time) for a A-Level grade comparison.
 
So in the end, you may have pointed out some flaws and it may not have given everyone the best A/B test, so please, whenever you can, feel free to best me by providing a better A/B example. 

bapu
That's what makes them majic.

Shirley ewe mean Mojique.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HEluoeMLTCI

EQ matching isn't everything, but it is a tool that can help compare audio.  Perhaps there are better tools?  At least for me, my ears said the difference was negligible and could easily be bridged with some mixing.  I didn't hear anything that would warrant adding yet another DAW to my workflow.  So for me this test was perfect.

Perhaps Roland could fund Bapu's next effort and provide pristine tracks in a genre that's actually worth comparing.
 
Meanwhile, on this one, kudos to Bapu, and I didn't even play along.
 
cheers,
-Tom

also, isn't it useful to see what the others can do? have you no interest in other cars than the model you drive, for example?

dcumpian
When I am knowledgeable enough to create a perfect mix (rock, pop or whatever), that could not possibly be any better in Sonar, then I'll start asking myself what outside of Sonar can take my mixes further.  Otherwise, it just smells too much like G.A.S....

gas, yes, indeed maybe  but unless you've been working on the same song the whole time, surely there are many more variables involved beyond the host app - and if you don't finish your mix before the next upgrade then you'll never get the perfect mix, only chase the moving goalposts, so, er, yeah, gas

mudgel
Why would that be interesting to us on the Sonar forum? I could care less how Studio One and Mixbus compare?

Well for starters the original thread is designed to find out if the internal console emulation in another DAW can match the unrivalled sound of Mixbus. That DAW happens to be Sonar in your case.  And I also feel the test examples are not good in this case.
 
But I am simply offering to see if I can do it on another DAW which actually happens to have a pretty nice console emulation built in and like Mixbus it is very easy to use.  Just a matter of turning it on and selecting the appropriate console. Although in Mixbus it is simply there all the time.
 
The Studio One minus the emulation VS Mixbus should show us there might be and I suspect a difference. Then the Studio One with the console emulator on vs Mixbus might also be another interesting comparison. Similar to the one here except in my case I would be much more selective and particular about the material being compared. I don't have Sonar Platinum so I can only do it with Studio One. I am about to get Logic though and it might be interesting to see if there is any console emulation going on in that too.
 
In the track here for example it is not terribly obvious. So maybe this type of music does not need it. It seems to work with or without emulation. In another genre though it may and will be different I bet.
 
So the moral of the story is be careful to base any results here on the music being tested in this example.
 
Soundwise may be right though and there may be enough tools built into Sonar to get a very similar result to Mixbus. The only thing here is it might take a few experiments to be able to make the settings in order to do it.  But then again she may be totally wrong and you will just never match the Mixbus sound no matter what you do.  And the good thing about this is that Mixbus is doing it all automatically and nothing needs to be inserted anywhere or tweaked so in some ways it is ahead in that regard.
 
And to Zo and others the aim of this is not to do a mix. Because the moment you start doing a mix on either DAW then all bets are off basically. Too many variables involved. Working with raw tracks and only setting volumes and pans and using no plugins anywhere are interesting tests to do. I did this with 4 DAW's and got identical results and no one could tell anything apart so that rules out the concept that DAW's do sound different in their basic form. They don't. But that was all done pre the console emulation era so it might be good to try it agin with the console emulators in operation.

The CTC-1 is a very nice console emulator and the fact is I think I can get a very similar sound to Mixbus. One of the emulations (Tube) gives you the extra air and highs etc and it is very controllable. The other is a slightly different sound and the third one allows you to set your own.  It sounds like a mastering console though and has the least difference. 
 
Good point too Bapu about using a Mixbus demo. There are a few of them around too.
 
Mixbus definitely does something nice to the mix and I perfectly understand why Bapu likes it too. It IS also nice to use. 

I used to teach audio engineering at a school in Melbourne (JMC) and they had a 2" 24 track coupled up to the Harrison M32C console. I rebuilt this mixer at one point and got it all going again from a very bad state. So I was working with it and hearing it for quite a while and really liked it.  It had this sweet top end that really came out on very delicate things such as high hats, snares etc.. On sounds that were not distorted but rather super clean.
 
Micheal Jackson's Thriller is a fine example of a pristine and delicate mix in parts. The Harrison really shines through in my opinion on that record.
 
Mixbus to me seems to have this same sort of sound vibe going on. (especially M32C with that channel EQ because that is where some of that sound seems to come from) But I don't doubt that Bapu is liking a heavy metal track either.  It could be adding some real warmth and power to the sounds too. 
 
The sound of the 2" tape machine and the Harrison was formidable indeed. Then they got a 24 channel Pro Tools HD rig and connected that to the Harrison. The Harrison allows you to connect two 24 track recording devices to it at once! So it is super easy to select which one you want to use and also dub from one 24 track multitrack to the other. (which we often did for obvious reasons)
 
The sound was still there even better in some cases with PT but then they got rid of the 2" and the Harrison (for $10K) and replaced it with a Control 24.
 
At first the sound in that control room was nothing like it was.  But with things like Mixbus that may be changing.
 

bapu

Rob[atSound-Rehab]
Just listened, but not yet read the other's comments above ... I got a clear preference. Will see if it turns out to be Mixbus or if I can save the money on upgrading to v4 (and invest in an hearing aid instead) ;-)

Why not go ahead and post your preference. 
 
It's not a bad/good or right/wrong thing.

My preference would be B (but I don't really consider that a "final" mix) and I think B is Mixbus ...
 
... because if you do an A/B comparison challenge you wouldn't make the contestant (mixbus) mix B as that would be too obvious ... so mixbus should be mix A ... unless you are bapu and you want to confuse people so you make mixbus mix B of course ;-)
 
Aside from the obvious logic above, mix B has slighlty more hi end (in the audible range, not talking about the close to 20 kHz difference the analyzer shows, which is rolled off in mix B, to me another indication that this is mixbus) and mix B is somewhat more compressed (which could be part of the mixbus magic as louder is always better) ...
 
yet, all of this could be totally the opposite as I have no idea how hard the default settings in Sonar drive the CE and TE vs how hard default mixbus drives its saturation stuff ...

If you used these consoles this might be closer to your heart. Big studios apparently used the Harrison a lot back then. This was way before we had all the goodies we have now. We move so far forward in tech and then we look back. Go figure. I've never even seen one let alone used one.
 
I don't see this as a totally unbiased or dependable review. If we didn't know there was  such a thing as Mixbus 32c and we heard it, would it knock our socks off? It this partially subliminal?
 
 TBH I never noticed anything radical with the console emulation .It might add a little "hair" to the mix. That's about it. A little of something good is much better than a whole lot of something mediocre, so I'm not dissing console emulation.
Be honest and tell me how much different the mixes are in this comparison with Reaper. Can you tell? 
 
On a normal system, as in a consumer system I don't notice much of a difference here.
 
https://youtu.be/5AfTXxIXL6s