Yes, but ProTools sounds better...

Hi guys, just done a little test... for personal curiosity, not polemics.

I wanted to compare a bunch of playback engines of the main DAW's and audio players. The software programs I chose to make this comparison are Logic Pro, Pro Tools, Ableton Live, OSX Preview Player, iTunes and Cog (awesome and recommended free audio player - link to download).

Aligned Files with max zoom ratio

To do that, I wired the built-in output of my MacBook Pro with the MOTU 828 MK3 connected to my iMac. In the MacBook Pro I played the same audio file (mono, 24/44.1) with all the software I mentioned above and recorded the analog output of the laptop with my iMac. The quality of the connections and converters should be insignificant, since I used the same configuration throughout the duration of the test.

Once I got all the recordings I aligned all the files using the maximum zoom ratio and compared them all, each time inverting the phase of one of the two I was comparing.

The result is surprising in some way.

They're all different from each other, but still quite similar (no abyss at all), except for the file played by Ableton Live, which really has nothing to do with all the others (this, in a way, makes me suspect something wrong).

The two couples of files which are more similar to each other are: ProTools/iTunes (!!!) and Cog/OSX_Preview.

I want to clarify that I absolutely didn't want to make a comparison between the algorithms the DAW's use to process or bounce the audio files, but only between the sound engines during simple playback.

If you like to try the comparison by yourself, here you can DOWNLOAD the files. Just make sure they're well aligned when you upload them in your DAW.

G'nite, mates.