Logic Studio vs Logic TDM vs Protools HD

personally, even just thinking of using that awful schizophrenic logic/TDM hybrid again gives me the shivers.. it was always (and seems to still be) an awful frankenstein's monster that (in my humble opinion) is more trouble than it's worth.

I have nothing against protools at all.. I work in feature film music as well, and I think like a lot of people these days, all the composition work gets done (in our case) in logic. some other notable names like harry gregson williams use cubase for the business end of the writing phase. but I've got no problem with the method of transferring the whole deal to protools sessions for the orchestra recording and then off to the mix. this way the engineers are happiest using what they know best for all the big recording sessions, likewise for the mix. and we get to focus on our work using the software that we know best too. the only painful bit is the transfer process of all tracks from logic to protools, especially when there are giga samplers and other inconvenient obstacles that prevent simple bouncing.. but as a method, it's all good.

in terms of working native for the composing phase.. there were all sorts of reasons why this wasn't up to par a few years ago, thus many people using their TDM hardware in that unhappy marriage with logic to allow us to have more grunt, better plug ins and so on, while staying in the working environment of the better app for writing, ie logic. there was a lot of talk for a long time that this was going to change, had changed, was about to change.. that the day of native systems getting the job done was around the corner, or had already arrived.. like usual, depends on who you listen to.
but really, at this point (as you seem to have discovered) in pretty much every practical sense, it's happened now. even on my MBP, it's actually quite funny how much serious work I can get done on alarmingly large projects... and it's at least a million times less painful and walking-on-eggshells-ey than any TDM/logic two headed monster I used to use. but that's just a laptop. with a full blown mac pro setup with all the bells and whistles, it's all good to go pretty much, especially when you kit it out with some lovely hardware like the (obvious choice) of an apogee symphony. that said, the interface side of it has been pretty good for a while already, metric halo, RME.. they've all pretty much made what a working composer needs to do absolutely achievable without even giving a second thought to logic/TDM.

as for the "plug in quality".. yes, for a while digidesign did manage to keep an artificial edge on the perceived (and actual) high end plug ins.. there was certainly an argument that all the real stuff was available for TDM and nobody else. with maybe a small handful of exceptions, this is far from the case any more. it feels like there are more plug ins of every sort available for native now, and most of the very best ones are well represented as well. not to even mention things like the UAD2, which on its own can make more sense as an add on for a composer working with logic than battling with logic/TDM if its the plug ins you're after..

as for differences in raw sound quality, phase coherence, summing.. all that stuff that people love to argue about.. as far as I can tell there's never going to be any agreement on that, and I don't really care either. logic uses completely different maths internally to protools - 32 bit float vs 48 bit fixed. do they sound different? probably. do they sound as different as the difference between the interfaces and converters used, the quality of the recording gear, the source material, the listening environment? absolutely not. does it really actual matter all that much? as far as I'm concerned, nope. and anyway, for anyone working in film like yourself, you're always going to be in projects where protools mixes get done, or where you mix some stuff in logic.. if you're using good high end interfaces and so on and you work with people that know what they're doing, you're going to get a good sound with these tools. frankly, while I find all the talk about 32 bit float vs 48bit fixed interesting.. for me, it's all just interesting nerdy audio book talk when it comes down to it.

as for the advice you got about how to do your mix in logic, and what was advisable and what wasn't with respect to working in protools, not sure I exactly followed what the engineer was referring to. I don't really see why there would be any problem making submixes in logic.. I'm guessing by that you meant to mix to stems? it's beyond me why this would pose any kind of technical problem, if you want to elaborate on the advice you got, go ahead.

in any case, my opinion on the whole issue is that really what it comes down to these days is much more about workflow, appropriate use of the tools at hand, and also the working culture of the industry. you would be mistaken to be worried that there's anything inherently 'wrong' or 'low quality' with working natively in logic, for compositional or mixing work. but it still remains that protools is the culture of the big studios, the engineers.. and for many reasons is still the gold standard for big recording sessions and mixes. no sense arguing with that. but just as you wouldn't condescendingly lecture a well respected audio engineer on why protools is not good enough at x, y or z, by the same token, don't be intimidated into thinking that doing the work you want to do in a native system is in some way technically inferior.

well tbird pretty much nailed it.

the difference between platform is utterly negligible in terms of quality. plenty of us work native with just logic on big stuff - even projects mixing down big live sessions. i have recorded at some big studios and not so big studios tracking in logic - even on PT rigs without a hitch. i don't know what the engineer talking to you thought he was saying it but it doesn't sound right to me.

provided everything was recorded with good gear, i don't think it makes a jot of difference quality wise whether you use logic, nuendo, cubase, PT or any other decent DAW. it all really boils down to workflow, just as tbird said.

i don't know about you, but the pace we are expected to work means that reliability and simplicity are the most fundamental and important requirements of a setup.

the only reason we have to interact with PT at all is because it is a standard in many recording studios. but then, we also have interact with sibelius (well orchestrators do) but that's another dimension to the process i wish we wouldn't have to deal with.

preparing for recording sessions in PT is as easy as exporting midi files, preparing click tracks and stems. nice to not have to do it, but you would have to even if you were tracking in logic.

really the only question is one of workflow. what is the easiest and fastest way to get what you need done...at the end of the day, a cue will stand by how good it is musically, not down to how you got it done.

oh man - you are absolutely good to go. i work in not a dissimilar fashion - often smudging enhancing and otherwise cacking up pre-recorded material. i am constantly nicking stuff from previous cues, gee - even previous JOBS with quite gay abandon. i am currently doing that very thing as we speak. i started reading your post while i was bouncing out a mix for the dub tomorrow....

that is not to say there are not issues to be aware of.

i do think there are benefits still to be had mixing in a really good studio with really smart people using really good gear. key to this is reverb and summing reverb. and there are other things brought into that process as well - recording to analogue tape which is still favoured at the really top end of the scale.

personally for me though, reverb is key. if you do everything in the box, then you have fantastic reverb available in space designer but when i compare to mixing out of my crappy old desk using a dodgy lexicon (its algorithms that count) i still get maybe 3 to 5% more lushness and gloss, esp on strings. i must say though i think i might have space designer cracked - certainly i am pretty happy with some of my ITB mixes lately.

and there are other issues pertaining to working entirely ITB as well - but really that is a slightly separate discussion from whether to go TDM or native.

the only argument for a while there was latency. using a TDM rig meant you could monitor with effects with next to no latency, and now with modern computers and an apogee symphony system you can do the same thing with the same if not better latency natively, with better quality (apogee have famously fantastic converters) and more cheaply.

but what we tend to do is record at a studio and accept whatever recording gear they have there, whether it is PT HD, or RADAR and their superb nyquist converters, or prsim converters going digitally into PT HD. that's where the quality matters most - capturing the sound.

we lose nothing taking it home and mucking around with it other than what we do muck things up ourselves. we don't need a flash PT rig to ruin a mix...

🙂

dick the flick wrote:
Perhaps my misplaced and out of date question about mixing down 5.1 sub mixes is due to a particular situation 3 or 4 years ago - when working with a very well respected engineer - he was certainly of the opinion then, that the sample accuracy (phase?) involved in sub mixing down batches of stuff in Logic didn't produce the clarity of result that Protools did.

Do a search in the Logic 7 forum. Member David Robinson has been very vocal in the past about what you're describing here.

But Logic 8 appears to have corrected this, with the re-write of the audio engine, making everything within the signal path sample accurate.

dick the flick wrote:
Yes - they all use Logic but NONE of them ever "seem" to complete a production without either exporting everything into Protools or using Logic "just for the midi work".

There's a reason that this used to be true: TDM hardware was the only option for many years if you wanted to record/complete a full 'normal' project without latency issues or lack of DSP power. Computers simply weren't powerful enough to allow us to using the lowest buffer settings throughout our project (meaning increased latency), and you could risk getting overload messages since you hadn't invested in extra DSP cards. This used to be the main reasons even the most hardcore Logic 'fanboys' invested in TDM hardware.

I'm basically doing audio stuff (not much MIDI), and I'm one of those who have left the TDM-domain: from working on a Logic/HD3 combo, I started to work almost 100% natively for a while, but kept one PT card just to deal with latency. The next step was to get rid of that card - which definitely felt like an upgrade, not a downgrade. Open plugins went faster, I could use interleaved files for my stereo tracks, I wasn't dependent on waiting for Digidesign to announce OSX compatibility when new versions of OSX was out, I could use offline bounce and my whole system was support dynamic allocation of unused DSP power. I didn't have to deal with 'is this possible on the non-native track' anymore - which was something I had to consider before I got an 8-core Mac (I was still using the Freeze function then).

WHERE are the QUALITY differences between Logic Studio vs Logic TDM vs Protools HD? Does anyone have some direct experience?

I have close to no experience with the PT software - I've occasionally asked PT using colleges to try to impress me and demonstrate what's better with the PT software than with Logic, with very little success. There are a few things in all software (including PT) I'd like to see in Logic - but in most cases I have come across, PT users are simply blissfully ignorant about things that can be done in PT that (unlike what they assume) also can be done in Logic (with a few exceptions - like Beat Detective and Elastic Time, which does stuff that only can be done in Logic in a much more time consuming and less elegant way).

Regarding 'quality differences'... I'm not sure what you mean by 'quality', but if you think of audio quality, I have yet to see anyone post two files (recorded/mixed in Logic or PT or Logic/TDM) documenting that PT's fixed 48-bit engine sounds better than Logic's 32-bit floating engine.

Plugin quality depends on the coding, and the good plugins that original is created on one platform are almost always ported over to the other - with very few exceptions. You ask where the quality differences are, not where the feature differences are... please elaborate! There are differences, but quality differences? Not sure if there are any...

This poll ( http://www.gearslutz.com/board/high-end/329784-what-plugin-format-you-using-lets -get-numbers.html) suggests that less than 17% of the DAW users are using TDM, which should say a little bit about where the money is.

This poll ( http://www.gearslutz.com/board/music-computers/285702-ultimate-logic-native-pro- tools-poll.html) suggests that almost twice as many people claim to be happy with Logic and not move over to PT as the other way round, and also indicates that almost nine times as many of those who answered rather want to buy a faster Mac than to buy TDM hardware if they need more processing power, which says something about where the future is.

I have a lot of experience using Logic with TDM hardware - and would never go back. My use of TDM cards was more or less an 'emergency solution' I had to use for many years until computers became fast enough natively to deal with professional audio, and this more or less happened circa the last year: the new 8-cores combined with Logic updates and OSX updates has given us a lot more power than I could get from my HD3 system, which is why I just don't need it anymore.

There are people that can hear 1ms latency, and the only way to get such a low latency is to use a native system (or use external, additional hardware). If you work at 44.1, even the most expensive Digidesign rig can't go lower than circa 2.4 ms, because Software Monitoring can't be switched off. Whenever a new subrelease of OSX is out that's optimized for better audio performance, your system will become 'better' (more plugins/tracks), while your TDM tracks will remain unaffected... this happened both in 10.5.3 and 10.5.4. With Snow Leopard, you'll also get the benefits from better multi-core optimization/GrandCentral/OpenCL - all of which (I assume) will affect your native tracks only.

Since there's no reason to assume that better plugins can be made on the TDM platform, or that the audio quality is better in non-native systems, I fail to see any reasons to use TDM other than if you would want to use the PT software with an unlimited version of PT (or if your projects are so massive that even the fastest Macs can't deal with them, which I doubt). All systems have bugs and features that the others don't have, but that's not about quality, it's about features/stability/performance - which seems to be what the Logic developers have been focusing on for a while (well, not so much features, but user interface changes).

If you come along someone who suggests that the audio quality is better in a TDM system, or that native system have issues with sample accuracy or phases problems, they should be able to document it by providing you with two comparable audio files. I have yet to come across such files.

reverbs. this is the one area the prevents me from going entirely ITB for everything, but i know i will eventually esp when i upgrade computers. yet the sound i get driving my desk hard and summing my lex reverb through it is just better. i have to get my ITB mixes to sound BETTER before i go all the way. i want an incremental improvement not just a match.

i did some blind tests between the 2 mastering methods and the OTB mix won comfortably...this led to an interesting discussion. you might find some of this information useful:

SD is a convolution reverb and as such it takes a snapshot of space and imposes that on the signal. but these spaces (even hardware reverb) are dynamic mean they change all the time which is why they sound organic and somehow more lush.

to get ITB mixes of the same reverb effectively means an expensive non-native solution such as the lexicon PCM96. if i was to do that i would probably want to check out the bracasti unit which everyone raves about first - apparently it was designed by some former engineers from lexicon who wanted to branch out and do their own thing.

i have tried all sorts of things to liven up SD reverb, adding chorus platinum verb (that wasn't too bad) tape delay, but the best solution i have come across is actually 2 SD reverbs.

i have the ToddAO 2.3 conductors position reverb on the reverb bus (bus 1), and i have an aux that takes that reverb signal and passes it through the PCM91 large hall 3.6 secs IR i downloaded from noisevault, and set the stereo to crossover. i call that aux 'extra reverb'

the beauty of that is i can automate how much of the extra reverb i want for the difference between something actiony going into something slower and more sumptious - or vice versa.

the lexicon large hall is really my go to reverb, either on my outboard box, or as an IR in SD. i also use small church and a couple of others, but nothing i have found says thomas newman gorgeousness on strings or piano like the large hall lexicon patch.

so there you are. i am looking eventually to have everything entirely in the box, and i am slowly working my way towards it. it is just harder to do than simply whacking a couple of stems out to my crappy old desk i bought when i was still in film school and chucking some lex reverb from my noisy crap outboard unit on top of it.

but such dilemmas as this vex me.

oh you can have waaaaaaaaaaaay more than 7 secs of reverb in SD. and it is great and extremely useful - i couldn't live without it.

what i mean is the reverb itself is static. that is to say, if you were to bounce a track with SD reverb on it, and then bounce a second copy, they would be identical. if you did they same thing with an external reverb such as a lexicon unit, they would be different evrytime. that is because part of what they do are complex modulations, filters and algorithms to reduce ringing (that kind bathroom echo type effect that sometimes crops up).

depending on how the IR was recorded you can have phase issues with the stereo signal - if you put a ganiometer on the reverb bus you will see what i mean.

i have discovered cheats while mixing in the box - i sometimes layer a warm pad or glass harmonica behind the strings to give a similar effect. but the large hall lexicon does this without trying.

its a war of inches, and reverb is really key if you want that extra bit of gloss (i think). none-the-less, vastly more important is quality of the music. SD and a decent IR is more than passable - and i use it as mastering solution very often (like now in fact).

If I insert a reverb on a track, I want to to sound the same each time I play back that track, but.... (how) is this different from using a convolution like eg. AltiVerb reverb in PT/TDM? (Or from using AltiVerb natively in Logic 8?)

ETA: Have you tried to make a Space Designer preset out of that Lexicon Large Hall, Rohan?

f I insert a reverb on a track, I want to to sound the same each time I play back that track, but.... (how) is this different from using a convolution like eg. AltiVerb reverb in PT/TDM? (Or from using AltiVerb natively in Logic 8?)

it isn't. this is a widening of the discussion from the value of using a native vs TDM to native vs doing anything outside of the computer at all.

ETA: Have you tried to make a Space Designer preset out of that Lexicon Large Hall, Rohan?

no need - i already have one from noisevault which is my go to IR for virtually everything. like i said know have it as additional to the toddAO reverb and the combination of the 2 gets me very good results - so good i am ITB at the mo.