AT

So, if you are Cakewalk and you "improve" an already existing product and it could possibly work/sound better (or not), do you want the grief on these boards and out in the aether that you are charging for bug fixes?  Cake hasn't claimed that the CA sounds better than the straight PC module.  But maybe in making it a VST they did a little internal work, too.  Or maybe it just sounds better for some unkown reason.  But not enough to justifying a real claim to sound since 4 out of 5 musical dentists can't recommend it.  By not claiming better sound they don't get the grief of announcing said improvement but still get the benefit of some claiming it sounds better.  Win/win.

@ 

These things aren't subjective though and they're easy to test. Our ears are very easily fooled, more so than the eye even. It's very easy to think something "sounds better" for any number of reasons that have nothing to do with sound at all. There was a good few years here where after every major Sonar release, there'd be inevitable posts about how the new Sonar sounds better than the older one. In reality, nothing changed. 


So how do you get around this? Test your software. Do a phase nulling test. If it nulls with the old version with the same exact settings, then they're EXACTLY the same, test over. If it doesn't nulls, then you'd want to try and analyze the frequency response of both. Are there differences? You'd want to check the harmonic distortion: are there differences? If yes, then one certainly may "sound better" than the other. 

If I were cake even if the engines were exactly the same I would flip a few bits in the engine so something turns out slightly different in these sort of tests even though the change would be inaudible. Although  I doubt though they would be this devious.

Just got Ca-2a this morning. Blind tests! There seems to be a smoothness in the Ca that was lacking in the Pc-2a. As far as a clinical test to find out how much, I don't think it is worth the time and effort to prove why it sounds better. I think we all just want great results when we switch any plug on. I do think the Ca has upped the ante a little. Now we'll see how long the re-release of Concrete, PC4k, etc. takes to come out. LOL!

Funky,

I agree w/ you.  I doubt Cake would mess w/ the sound and not make a deal about it.  But like the PC work, enough people reported that it no longer crashed on their system that something they did actually improved performance stability down the line.

I'm not a programmer, so I have no idea why or how coding works.  I do have a good idea about unintended consequences.

Besides, if the posters hear a smoother or warmer sound, even if it is placebo, they might approach their work differently and go for the warmer/smoother sound they are liking and use the CA that way.  Unintended but actual.

@

If I’m not mistaken they update Ca-2A to internal x64bit double precision floating points...
By the way. during the "install" the x64bit service pack get update too. Like someone said already I don't care! The new plugin sound awesome and to my ear it sounds warmer. And the best thing is that all bugs are gone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QT1Gsuga4IE#!

WNAMM13: Cakewalk Releases Vintage Compressor Emulation In VST And AU Boxversion