I recommend SONAR banana peal, it has slicker lead tones

Two words:
Double Blind.
 
Anything else is blowing smoke and means absolutely nothing.  I would say, however, that maybe a perceived "sound" comes from the bundled plugins that get a lot of use and as a result, become the "sound" of a DAW by association.  But even that is probably giving too much credit to the idea.
 
Bill.

olive2sing
I recommend SONAR banana peal, it has slicker lead tones

Mmmm. Sounds a peeling.

bdickens
Two words: confirmation bias.

Digital audio is digital audio. DAW software is not responsible for the sound quality. Hardware ( converters) is.

So true.  As soon as we make up our minds we look for evidence to support our conclusion. 

The summing question for DAW comparison is not new.  The individual audio (unmixed, unpanned etc) has been analyzed many times and in a single model... ASIO for example has generally been acknowledged to be identical across DAWS. 
 
The actual volume of the summing is measurable in a non subjective way (DB) and there was no real differences there on the comparisons I have seen online.   After the native initial audio is saved, further mixing and processing in the digital world might create variations that could "sum" to be noticeable. Someone could/should do a diff on the resulting wavs.
 
Whatevs man. Check this quote out....
 
"for music distribution, 16 Bit @ 44.1 kHz (CD standard) is indistinguishable from 24 Bit @ 192 kHz in a sample of listeners. In other words, more bits and higher bit-rates are not going to improve the 'quality' of your tracks".    --from the article referenced above from imageline. 
 
Horse pucky.  If you don't hear a difference in a mix or of audio at 44 and 192 you might consider getting a checkup.  When I changed several DAW projects over to 192 K from 44 and it was like being able to hear for the fist time.   
 
 

Yep SONAR sounds like SONAR alright. And that is why we use it.
 

I did an experiment some time ago summing an exact mix into 4 DAW's. Logic, ProTools, Sonar and Studio One.  No plugins used though just level and panning. (Panning was also only L,C,R as well.) I got identical result from all 4.  I could null any two of them.  A room full of experts could not hear it either.  The moment you start using plugins in any of them, then all bets are off.  There will always be differences then.  It is not the summing engines that sound different.  It is everything else that sounds different. 
 
I also did another experiment earlier too. I had a turntable with the finest pickup known to man playing back a very high quality vinyl recording (Sheffield Lab stuff) The pickup had frequency response to 50kHz as well. (Ortofon SL15Q) Used a $1000 RIAA equaliser preamp too.  This signal went to one side of an A/B switcher.  I also fed the signal into A to D and D to A converter at 44.1K and 16 bit.  And put that on the other side of the switch box.  So in one position you were hearing the turntable direct and in the other the A-D D-A version of that sound at 44.1K 16 bit.  Perfectly level matched of course.
 
Room full of engineers with amazing ears could not pick either.  So to papacucko I say horse pucky.  You would not have a hope in hell in a blind test like this.
 
On this sampling rate issue you might want to read this:
 
https://www.mixonline.com/recording/emperors-new-sampling-rate-365968
 
 

stm113cw
Sahaj Ticotin who is/was the brilliantly talented vocalist for a band named RA and apperantly does work for other people now posted on FB about some of the features in Cubase 9.5 like 64bit floating processing, built in melodyne, vocal align to which I casually mentioned that Sonar Platinum has had his kind of stuff for a while.

His reply is “but Sonar sounds like Sonar”. I asked for clarification and he said “A little grainy with a bit of bottlenecking in the summing dept. At least to my ears...”

Not trying to start a war but, is this a common assessment of Sonar?

 
Ok here goes...Cubase apparently have only just added 64bitfp to their software. Correct me if I'm wrong but Sonar has had 64bitfp since version 8 - so at least 10 years. 
 
Sonar does sound grainy - if you don't engage the 64bit fp engine and upsampling, and so does every other DAW on the market. I even have upsampling switched on when I'm mixing and recording at 96khz. I know this because, as a creative...sure I have degrees in audio production, music technology, sonic art and even fine art lol, my point being I'm a real musician not an engineer as such, but I've got work I've been working on since 2000, and I've mixed these projects at 24bit, 32bit and now 64bitfp. The difference is light and day. And I can make this claim because I know the music so well and because I've trained my ears (I use AKG 712s headphones for mixing - monitors are useless when trying to hear the level of detail needed to dial in emulated THD, and indeed if you are creating surround sound for headphones with ambisonics).
 
When I finally heard what I was adding in, in regards to the analogue emulation aesthetic or THD, and when I switched on Sonar's 64bit fp mix engine along with upsampling...I finally understood the digital audio paradigm. And this was only a few months ago. 64bit fp is the software solution to the digital hardware problem - jitter and dynamic range. The problem is, not too many people actually understand this - especially the old school analogue engineers. This means, and creates another a problem. These old school engineers tend to send signals in and out of the box, so they can mix with outboard processors, meaning they can never take advantage of the 64bitfp mix engine. Once inside the box, the audio cannot be sent out again to analogue gear - unless it's the final master and is being sent for physical distributions.
 
I'm not sure about other DAWs and their mix engines...hmm Profools always sounded crap to me...but its been a few years, and I'm not sure if their propitiatory effects were even written to process at 32bitfp back in the day, but I'm not sure about other DAWs - however if you use a Windows machine for music production...I see no reason to use any other DAW. Furthermore, and finally...the person writing on Facebook that said 'Sonar was grainy' was talking bumpkin...and was probably not using Sonar's 64 bit mix engine. Ask him that question, I'd be keen to know what his answer is.
 
I hope that answers the OPs question - I know I can go off-topic lol. I'm a mad scientist...what do you expect?
Ben

Sonar's lowpass filter's passband frequency response in it's sample rate converters (SRCs) is more narrow than protools, logic, cubase, reaper, mixbus, samplitude, and fl studio. The design parameter is that it should be less than one-half of the sampling frequency. So it complies with that but I think cakewalk would have to address why they opted to design it this way.  http://src.infinitewave.ca/   The data was collected from X3.
This might impart some difference in sound that possibly could be heard by discerning ears, certainly it could be measured.

I would have marked Jeff's post as helpful, but it has already been done (thanks for posting that Jeff). For the OP, just be aware also of a writer's bias... in the days of the internet, there is no requirement to validate opinions, and the ratio of opinions to facts is growing rapidly (for the worst IMO). When you come across people with hard-core stances who never offer a lick of supporting information, the saying "Opinions are like buttholes... everyone has one" may be applicable. Take it with a grain of salt (and walk away).
 
For Ben, I believe SONAR 6 as the introduction of 64-bit, c. 2005.