I’ve finally tracked down the issue with renderings (both offline and realtime) sounding dull and lack of headroom. It seems that eq vst plugins, including the higher end ones, cause this issue with Podium. When mixing the sound is great, but after rendering and export the quality of the WAV file sounds different, dull, muffled, sometimes thin depending on the eq plugin. You can tell the difference listening through headphones even more. For example, I love ZPEQ but having multiple instances on different tracks and also on the master, the sound changes after real time render and export to WAV (32bit floating). Same goes with other eq’s from different companies. If I remove all eq plugins but leave other effect plugins such as reverb, delay, etc. active the realtime bounce sounds pretty spot on with the exported WAV.
The way I’ve been able to temporarily go around this is to only eq each track, bounce them, disable the eq, and only do the final master rendering with the bounced eq tracks. The exported file sounds close, and the headroom is maintained.
Is it possible for you to check into this? Thanks.