[nigelpry]

Originally Posted by b1daly

I suspect that most difference people perceive between DAWs are attributed to how their GUI works. Controls, both virtual and physical, have a major effect on the choices made, and could tend to cause things to sound different in different DAWs. For example, Sony Vegas had a default pan mode with a single slider that moved one side of the channel, blending it to the the other. No pan law. So if you had a stereo track, hard panning simply summed it to mono, making it a lot louder, and causing any stereo effects to sound weird.

Pro Tools has a similar scheme, but more flexible with individual pan knobs for each side of the channel, and a pan law in effect.

Logic, at least the last time I checked, had a simple balance style pan control. On a stereo track, moving the knob to the left simply reduced the right side level (and vice versa).

This would tend to leave you with very different sounding mixes if you had stereo tracks in your project!

The thing is .... all these explanations are genuine reasons why the mix would be different, and that's perfectly valid. It also means that you would be able to measure the difference with appropriate measurement tools.

The suggestion being made in a earlier post wasn't this. There was a suggestion made that somehow there was a difference that was not measurable, that files would null, but that, nevertheless, each DAW had its own 'sound' that was imparted into the audio when playing back. Even playing back the very same file.

Your suggestions are a few of many good reasons why different daws might sound different, but they would all be measurable.