I am a Volunteer Editor for an Australian Community Radio Station. A little over a year ago we purchased a Presonus StudioLive 16.0.2 mixer with a Windows 7 laptop computer for use with "Capture" as a multi-track location audio recorder. Since we have always used Adobe Audition (currently ver 3) as our "House DAW", it seemed sensible to continue its use to mixdown the multitrack Capture files to stereo.
However, recently one of our Recordist/Editors reported that he has experienced clipping of waveforms when using Audition compared with Studio One. He is a very particular operator and I believe him when he says that at no time whilst recording did he see any red LEDs light on any of the input channels, nor did he notice any peak distortion in his earphones at that time.
But when using Audition to layup the multi-track files created by Capture he noticed "flat-topping" of some peaks which could not be seen when using Studio One to do the same task!
Since both Audition and Studio One are looking at the very same digital WAV files created by Capture, how could this be? Neither DAW converts between digital and analog (except during actual playback) so surely they should display the same wave-shape! Has anyone else experienced this or a similar discrepancy when using Adobe Audition to edit multi-track files? And what might be the cause of this peculiarity?