well sonar outputs exactly what it is.

The point of the card and the monitors is to be able to play "what it is" as accurate as possible without "coloring" it into something that it is not.

Lance

Thanks Lance, a truly professional response, might just cut and paste this into my audio tips file.

haha cool!

Lance

The audio interface could in theory not exist on your system but you could still export audio.

That should tell you how important it is.

Sonar is totally responsible for the number crunching during export it isn't a function of the sound card.

The quality of the room and your monitors has the biggest effect on the choices you make when mixing.  The small differences between the output of modern audio cards (including an onboard Realtek) is pretty much insignificant compared to this.

The case for a top end sound card lies more in the quality of the pres the amount of I/O it provides and its ultra low latency performance.

No impact if you don't run it thru the audio card AD DA. Its and Internal process.

I confirmed this with Noel:  Exporting audio is pure math.  It does not use the audio device at all. 

Yeah, it's strictly a "digital" function, no analog or audio device is involved in creating the exported file.

One important thing you must not forget...

A lot of the "FX" like audiosnap and V-Vocal as examples have at least 2 or 3 quality settings.
When you hit the Play button to hear your mix in real time Sonar will default to using lower quality/"faster computing" settings in order to keep up with all the calculations required.
When you "export to audio" the high quality settings are used by default as there is no "real time" requirement, so small anomalies you may hear from, say, v-vocal will dissapear in the exported version.

This does mean that in practice the exported version will sound slightly different to what you hear when you simply press Play, but hopefully in a better way.

There is a way around some of this, and that is to render individual tracks first to force using the high quality settings, (bounce to track), though you still have the same issues with FX on the Master bus.  Rendering the Master bus is, by definition, exporting to audio...

It should be noted though that none of this is affected by the quality of the soundcard as the soundcard simply converts the final calculated data stream to audio.

..old thread...oops...it is exactly 6 years old....started a new thread instead...