the audio quality of ableton live is the subject of many lively debates on the internet. many people claim that live doesn't sound as good as, say, apple logic, and that live's summing bus is to blame. if the claims were true, i wouldn't hesitate a single moment to switch from live to logic for mixing. so i compared ableton live's and apple logic's summing bus with a null test, and talked about the results in a previous post. i couldn't find a significant difference, so whatever difference people are hearing, it's probably not due to the summing bus. but what could it be then? in my post, i already mentioned the placebo effect and peer pressure. but i think there is another, more substantive reason why live and logic sound different.

i worked in logic for about 7 years and have been using live for 4 years now, and it's clear to me that you'll make music differently in live, with sonic consequences. logic is a traditional sequencer. live is all about taking something, resampling it, mangling it, resampling it again and mangling it some more. logic is about working linear. live is about doing a sketch, extending it, going back to the drawing board and then combining sketches. logic is about composition. live is about playing.

it's not that black and white of course, and each program can do a lot the other program can do. but i think it's fair to say that both programs have a different approach to making music, and that live's way can essentially be characterized as patch-working. remember that live once started out as a program to combine audio loops. it has evolved, but at its heart it's still about mangling and combining.

and that's where i think the perceived lower audio quality of ableton live comes from. there is nothing wrong with live itself, but it comes from the way people typically use it. in live, de-tuning or time-stretching audio seems to be as basic as changing the volume of a channel. these tools are such an integrated part of working with live, that it's easy to forget they usually have artifacts and degrade your audio. just realize that a proper pitch-shifter with a range of -1/+1 octave will set you back about twice the price of live. and while ableton's warp modes work reasonably well when pitch-shifting clips just a few semitones, why not pitch-shift audio 4 octaves, resample it, and use it as the main element of your track? live won't stop you.

live also does away with the traditional slot-based use of insert effects. instead, you can easily add tons of effects to a channel and with audio effect racks make all sorts of parallel/serial configurations. resample. repeat. coming from a hardware background, this is something i really had to get used to. i was accustomed to just applying 1 or 2 effects to a channel, printing it, and leaving it at that. bwoy, did i feel old when i saw how effects were used in live by people who grew up with software. more is not always better, but i was absolutely stunned by the mileage they got from simple audio material treated with effect upon effect upon effect.

now just imagine what happens when you combine 30+ channels of time-stretched, effect-mangled and de-tuned audio into a track. chances are it will sound gritty. this is not always bad, and in fact, being able to take things into lo-fi territory seems to be a big part of live's philosophy. but it's not all live can do. if you want pristine audio, buy some top of the bill plugins, exert restraint and use live as you would a traditional daw. live won't stop you.

to take myself as an example, i take great care to optimize the audio quality in live: i won't have any channels or plugins clipping, use the k-system to provide me with some headroom on the master bus, resample at 32bit, use the best plugins i can afford, try to avoid pitch and time operations, pick the relevant warp mode when i do pitch-shift and time-stretch and put audio clips in hi-quality mode whenever needed. but in the heat of inspiration, sometimes even i forget to be careful. having to be that careful is one of the disadvantages of the audio-mangling power of live, but for me, it doesn't outweigh the advantages.

with all things being equal, live should sound as good as any other daw. but things are hardly ever equal. the point is that live is also a sounddesign tool. and some seemingly basic operations you can do are so extreme, that it's hard to keep good fidelity. just take a look at the technique i talked about in my previous post. that's the stuff that live is made of.

as i see it, live shouldn't be blamed for the lower perceived audio quality, it's the user that does it. using live in a typical audio-mangling way and then blaming it for the resulting sound quality is in my opinion the same as blaming a distortion plugin for distorting audio. admitted, a top-range sounddesign tool like symbolic sound's kyma will probably sound better than live with similar operations. but the $3000 price tag for the entry level version says it all. and even they can't claim pitch-shifting audio 4 octaves is artifact-free.

so in the end it's your own responsibility to make live sound good. live won't prevent you from making good-sounding music. but extreme sonic manipulations are so central to it, that it's hard to just work with it like you would with a more traditional sequencer like logic. and in some cases, you'll hear that.