sonarman1

sharke
Again, for those claiming that one DAW has a superior basic sound than another, answer me this. Why have DAW manufacturers (apart from Harrison) never, ever approached their marketing efforts from that angle? Can you think of one single DAW manufacturer (apart from Harrison) which has boasted about such things as "warmth," or "superior stereo imaging" from their sound? I can't. In fact if anything, the only thing you can imagine them boasting about is how transparent their sound is, and you don't even hear them say that. 

Not true. I have seen Daws marketed as Enhanced audio engine, Superior sound, etc. I have watched a few S1 videos where its marketed as sounding superior. Not sure if its a official video. However the validity of such marketing is questionable.

And dont forget that protools was marketed for a while stating as sounding best. I couldnt find those old promos now. This is one of them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPPjpjZGtns
There is another video its all about protools sounding better.  

The only way I hear DAW manufacturers describe their audio engines is with words like "pristine," i.e. "clean." They might use phrases like "best sounding" to describe the whole package of the DAW in general, but that could include things like native plugins and other sound shaping features.
 
No DAW manufacturer makes the same kind of claims made by fans of the DAW on forums - these are claims that pure audio simply running through the audio engine comes out sounding better than through other DAW's. Phrases like "better soundstage" and "superior stereo imaging" and "tape like warmth" are frequently bandied about on forums. They are definitely not referring to the whole package of the DAW including the plugins. They are saying that the bare audio engine itself produces these qualities. 
 
DAW manufacturers stay away from claims like this because they know they can't be proven in properly controlled tests. If Sonar really did have a superior sound stage or better bass response and it was all provable in tests, I believe Cakewalk would have been all over it. If Avid could determine what exactly it was about Pro Tools' audio engine that was better sounding, they would be shouting it from the rooftops. 
 
They're quite happy to let well known producers and engineers make these claims. They're not exactly going to correct them. They just won't make them themselves. 
 
I believe that when I first read Cakewalk's promotional blurb for Sonar back in 2012, it said something like "pristine 64 bit audio engine." I took that to mean that it reproduces sound accurately and without coloring or distortion. There's no other reason to believe that any other DAW does it any differently. 2+2 always equals 4. 

REPOST:
 

don't know if you've seen this before,
i'm just starting to drill down into this thing as well..
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qPCXGFJDA4
 

I haven't started a project (song) in Studio One yet.  I'm learning the shortcuts to the basics at the moment.  I'm confident it can get my job done.  I probably won't move full-time to it until a couple more months.  But I have made a decision that it will be my studio DAW in the next year.  So for now it's wrapping my head around how it does things that I'm SO used to in Sonar.  No complaints at the moment.

One aspect of Studio One that might take SONAR users a while to get used to is how multitimbral vst instruments are handled e.g. Sampletank, Kontakt, UVI Falcon etc. It took me a few days to get my head around this but when you have several MIDI tracks routed to individual MIDI channels on the same VSTi and use a MIDI volume fader on just one of the tracks to adjust that track: ALL the tracks are adjusted?! This seems counter intuitive and the only way I can get things to behave in the manner of just about every other DAW on the planet is to enable as many individual audio outputs in the VSTi as I need for separate tracks and control the track volumes (and pan) from there via the console view. There are postings on the Presonus forums questioning this issue but it seems that the software is actually designed to work this way. Despite this, I have enjoyed working with SI hugely and for me, despite some 'habit induced' niggles,  believe that most SONAR users would feel at home with this DAW

Good thing setting multiple output for instruments is very easy in S1

Sacalait
I haven't started a project (song) in Studio One yet.  I'm learning the shortcuts to the basics at the moment.  I'm confident it can get my job done.  I probably won't move full-time to it until a couple more months.  But I have made a decision that it will be my studio DAW in the next year.  So for now it's wrapping my head around how it does things that I'm SO used to in Sonar.  No complaints at the moment.

+1
 
As far as sound difference, projects I've transferred over to S1 sounds exactly the same.
Software only passes through audio from and to your converters, it does not modify the source file in any way unless you process it. 
It's like saying Windows Media Player and VLC sound different playing raw files. They don't. 
 
 

Matron Landslide

 

  

This is a very funny image and I got a big laugh out of it, but it isn't really true. A better analogy would be to show Sonar as an evergreen tree in full foilage, but only half the height of Studio One (or any competitor). 
 
Because for me Sonar is not dead. As long as nothing disables it, I would be very happy never having to use any other DAW. It's great at the state where it is now, and is probably better than most of the competition. Unlike others, I don't buy software based on future developments that may or may not be relevant to what I do. That's why I've never upgraded Microsoft Office since 2007 (the newer versions are bloated and designed more for publishing blogs and web sites than documents) or Adobe Creative Suite since version 5. These programs do everything I need them to do now. If industry standards change in a way that I can longer use these programs, I'll switch at that time. Sonar's tree may be not be growing, but as far as I'm concerned it will remain evergreen. 

bitflipper
When an application fails with a C0000005 error, it's a bug. It means the program attempted to write to an invalid memory location, and is almost always caused by a null pointer. Programmers are not supposed to allow that to happen, but it's very easy to overlook a possible null pointer scenario. In can be extremely difficult to duplicate a crash scenario (which is why crash dumps exist). So it's an entirely forgivable mistake, but still a bug. Not sunspots, not RFI, not humidity, not the brand of speakers or audio interface you use.
 
External components are also part of that environment. The C++ runtime library, the audio drivers, plugins, Windows support DLLS - they can all crash an application. However, the crash dump tells you which module raised the error, which is how I know that 13 of my 14 SONAR crashes were caused by plugins. My current dumps identify Studio One.exe as the module that raised the errors.

I am no way going to defend Sudio One. But any DLLs have access to the whole process memory. So it can corrupt something in the data of different module. Plus multi-threading (when and what is called in parallel in plug-in can be DAW specific).
One example - Tracktion tries to solve Waveform + Collective problem for half an year, still no success... Previous bug I hit was due to a bug in JUCE when started under German locale in Linux: observation was complete freeze with consuming the whole RAM
 
When it is possible to claim that the problem is 100% in the DAW? Only with "plug-in firewall". Sonar does not have it. Reaper HAS it. Studio One? I do not know... 

sharke
nobody has ever been able to demonstrate conclusively that one DAW sounds different to another. 

 
Correct! Which is why some of the comments are just out of place.
One DAW should not sound different, unless there are effects and or processing applied to the sound.

AI
 

Each DAW advises "enhanced, better" etc but the second part of the sentence that's always missing is "than...." So each is legally in the clear. They never say better than what....If pressed they can say "better than our earlier versions". If there's ever any documented proof, that would be and sometime is, highly pushed.

Joe_A

Jarsve
I have one positive thing to say about Studio One that i have not been liking about Sonar. And that the pan. That you in S1 can type in you ban insted of the way in Sonar where you have to dial it in by the mouse. That is time consuming if you have 21 track of choir you want to pan in a specific way.
 
What S1 needs fast is groups in the faders, pans, mute, solo and so on. The way that is in sonar is priceless. I use them all the time. then you can make one automation for all the tracks in the group without having to make the automation for all the tracks.

*Just out of curious what are you tracking (miking) to get up to 21 choir tracks?

Tx!

He's doing a We are the World Remake!