Qustion to the minds of the bar

[Martin Naef]

Tony,

Tony Scharf wrote:
> Anyway, my question is  basically, am I full of it or is he?  Is the
> different sound I am hearing a product of my imagination, or are there
> possibly different ways the different audio programs (FL Studio,
> Maschine, Live, and Battery were discussed) that could result in each
> having its own 'sound' with only the summing engines coming in to

I'm with THB on that one. Floating point math is of finite precision, 
and depending on how you do it (e.g. order of summing, grouping of 
channels, dithering, etc.), differences will add up. That's before 
you've added things like waveshaping, limiting etc.

In case of VST instruments, there's also the question of quantisation. 
It can be a lot more efficient to always keep samples aligned to some 
blocks - which could be 4 samples, 16 samples or whatever works nicely 
within the engine. So there's a trade-off between efficiency vs. 
absolute timing precision. Resampling was mentioned as well (of which 
there are *many* different ways of doing it). All this leads to 
differences that eventually add up, and I'm not the least bit surprised 
that one can hear the individual character.

At the same time, I also think that some people spend way too much 
energy into such tiny differences and totally forget that it's about the 
music...

Martin