I like A more than B.
B sounds too saturated to me. I bet it would sound better with Beats by Dre™®©

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.

As Jeff points out, what genre each of you "prefers" may not match this test case and therefore not be very conclusive (for you). For those that own SONAR or Studio One (with CTC-1) you could always perform your own conclusive test with a MB demo.
 
TBH I hardly listened to this material as I was being anal/clinical that I got the technical aspect as close as I could.
 
I happen to love what Mixbus is doing for the specific Metal tune I'm working in ATM.
 
Maybe what I could do is take a pre-matstered version of THIS SONG of mine and do this whole type test all over? Again, for the comparison of the SONAR Console emulation vs. Mixbus and then give the non-console emulation SONAR tracks to Jeff to do the Studio One  CTC-1 version (I own Studio One Pro but not CTC-1).

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. 

Very cool to compare. If this were my band and I got to pick A or B, B would be my obvious choice.
 
Thanks for the demo, Bapu.
 
I'm curious what does this... it sounds a bit like multiband compression (very light) or saturation maybe. Idk. I like it though.
 
And to the folks who didn't like the music choice for the demo, I'm not so sure. It seemed a good choice to emphasize the difference.

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.
 

This all started when Larry said "Drop any trk into MB and it will make it better!" Then Soundwise suggested this could be done in Sonar with PC CE and TE.
 
Bapu did a fine job. Thanks.
 
But I would suggest that one trk, not a mix be treated to the same stuff that the mix was done. A guitar, piano, hihat, just one trk.

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 ...

In Mixbus you only have control over the amount of tape saturation and we don't actually know how much of that was used either unless Bapu mentioned it earlier. But the rest of the Mixbus console emulation is fixed.
 
I am not over familiar with Sonar in this regard but I am assuming there is more control over the amount of console emulation like there is in Studio One with the drive control etc and the character control etc..
 
So in another way it is also not a realistic test because we don't know how much of what was used with either. 
 
 

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