Hi Rob,
I am just guessing here but I have a theory that when you mix into the same DAW the mix sound suffers from lack of processing power in the computer.. I mix to an external CD recorder and I never experience this problem.. Kurt

Originally posted by Rob Chittum:
Hey folks,
...Sounds great when I am in the mixing section, but when I mix down to stereo tracks, it sounds less punchy to me than before the mixdown (in the same room on same system...

Rob

Rob:

How is it that you're monitoring while "in the mixing section" versus when you're bouncing to disk? What command(s)/set-up are you using to do the two-mix? Also, when you say that the sound is "less punchy" are you talking about:

* Spectral differences?, and/or,
* Amplitude differences?, and/or,
* Panning differences?, and/or,
* Dynamic processing differences?

BTW, doing the Nuendo "internal" two-mix bounce (even at 44.1/16)will give you EXCELLENT quality for mastering (BWAV files)--contingent upon the source material and your mixing job, of course. :)

There's no reason to mix externally unless you're processing with external boxes to give you specific characteristics...

Regards,
Ferd

Another engineer at our place compared a mix Bounced to disc within Pro Tools with the exact same mix recorded directly to an external CD Burner. The mix off the disc done to the external burner was in every way superior to the Bounced file made in Pro Tools. He felt the lack of punch and depth was due to our mastering program software, but maybe Kurt is on to something here. Although I always convert my mixes to Stereo files after the bounce and never during, there still could be some limitations in the processing power of our system which could be the cause. I'll have to try the same experiment some day where I will take a Bounced file and one of the same mix burned directly to CD, import them both into our mastering program and see what I get.

Dear Mr. Wizard (I've always wanted to say that!):

Originally posted by horowizard:
Another engineer at our place compared a mix Bounced to disc within Pro Tools with the exact same mix recorded directly to an external CD Burner. The mix off the disc done to the external burner was in every way superior to the Bounced file made in Pro Tools. He felt the lack of punch and depth was due to our mastering program software...

Anectdotal, but the man hears what he hears!

...there still could be some limitations in the processing power of our system which could be the cause...

I don't really understand what you mean by "processing power"? What is the "bounce" process and how, given the processing that you're presumably already doing, is it that much more taxing on your system? I would think that if your output bus master is set for 0dB, that there doesn't have to be more processing going on then when you're not bouncing down to two tracks*. So there's a ZERO additional performance hit for such a process when compared to the regular stereo monitoring process. On top of that, I don't know about PT, but with Nuendo, the two-mix bounce process is not necessarily realtime(i.e., could be faster, the same or slower than realtime depending upon the processing load), so even *IF* it was more taxing than the plain ol' monitoring process, it can take its own sweet time...if required. Does this make sense? I suspect there's something else going on that would require careful scrutiny (who's got the time???) to uncover!

Personally, on Nuendo, I've only experienced any perceptible "slowdown" on a modest system (1.8GHz Athlon) with more than 100plug-insand >50 tracks(resulting in a CPU usage > 90%), but there were still with no perceptible audio artifacts. When imported into Samplitude, the resulting mixdown sounds fantastic (if you like that sort of thing)!

Regards,
Ferd

* - There's nothing that guarantees that the PT guys are following a "rational" bus implementation, but without actually going through their code, we can't say for sure. However, with the given conditions (and purely for the mixing function...from a system's view) there doesn't have to be any additional CPU loading.

Well, it's been a while since I visited this forum. After much experimenting I deduced that The differences in the final product are the result of the actual burning speed of the mastered program. Our burner was running at 12 to 24x the speed of the actual running program, and so a lot of detail was getting passed over for one reason or another. A real time 1:1 rendering of the program will always sound better than a copy made at double or any times the speed.