Sound quality of mixing in Protools vs others..Discuss

[Bob Olhsson]

Pro Tools had some real problems twenty years ago but at this point I've not heard anything better and a few things worse.

[groundcontrol]

Remember when the Dithered Mixer was introduced... And you had to manually choose it.

[JFreak]

Guys, please google "pan law", that is the most important differentiating factor between mixers. Even then, it only affects to how you mix, you can get two identical mixes using two different pan laws. Room acoustics also affect to which pan law you choose. Myself, I like 3.0 but don't mind the PT default of 2.5 and in the very best studios I've chosen up to 4.5

[Bob Olhsson]

I remember having to do pre-mixes for film in the '90s using the gain control on a waves renaissance eq. because the moment you touched a Pro Tools fader everything sounded edgy.

[Gentoo]

I have ProTools specifically for mixing and lately, mastering. All of my composing and creation is done in Cubase. However, I personally like the sound from ProTools a little better for mixing. I can't quite put my finger on what it is overall. However, the stock plugins in PT I also prefer. My mixes have a more polished sound out of PT.

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by Gentoo

I have ProTools specifically for mixing and lately, mastering. All of my composing and creation is done in Cubase. However, I personally like the sound from ProTools a little better for mixing. I can't quite put my finger on what it is overall. However, the stock plugins in PT I also prefer. My mixes have a more polished sound out of PT.

It might be anything from accuracy of latency compensation, accuracy of automation, but this old thread most probably was all about different mixing engines, a.k.a. "48bit fixed-point vs. 32bit (now 64bit) floating-point war".

Long story short, TDM mixer sounds very nasty instantly if you go over, which means better gain staging by default. Going over on floating-point is more subtle and starts smearing the sound a lot later but it builds up (which is why some plugins emulate fixed-point distortion to prevent bad gain staging)

[albee1952]

The mention of the pan law is a lot bigger deal(wish I had remembered that in my first reply). Switching that to-4.5 really improves things for me

[Bob Olhsson]

The problem with TDM is that it truncates everything on both ends to 24 bits. The dithered mixer plug-in solves the feed to plug-ins but the plug-in developers needed to dither the output of their plugs. Waves and a few others took care of this but many didn't. The 64-bit float mixer in PTle and HD versions after PT 11 solved the "crispy" loss of depth problem in addition to the overload susceptibility.

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by albee1952

The mention of the pan law is a lot bigger deal(wish I had remembered that in my first reply). Switching that to-4.5 really improves things for me

You have a great room then, good for you!

That's why the stereo mixer originally had -2.5 bcs more often than not the room wasn't that good (and generally post people doing surround had better rooms which is why -3.0 standard)