Here we are all these years later with the release of Nuendo 5, which is solid and loaded with great new features. Everybody wants great sound, right? Well, Nuendo 1.5 had its share of problems, like crashing in the middle of a great take while tracking, but because I always seem to support the underdog, I stuck with Steinberg. I heard a demo of Nuendo 1.5 and sonically I was blown away. To me, Digi’s 888 converter was far from perfect, and I was in search of something better. There seemed to be little concern about how it sounded, as everyone just bought into the idea that it was digital, so it must be perfect. Pro Tools offered a complete, proprietary system of software, hardware interfaces and DSP cards that made up for the deficiencies of the computer.

There were other DAW options at the time, but computers were slow and not very powerful, so host-based DAWs struggled. You had a choice: Use Pro Tools, or die the slow, painful death of becoming an irrelevant recording engineer. I started using Nuendo about 11 years ago, back when state-of-the-art, tape-based digital recording systems like Sony’s PCM-3348 seemingly became obsolete overnight. Nuendo 5’s Mixer features the new Waveform view.

Steinberg nuendo 5