So I finally got a chance to work on this. I trashed the Nuendo prefs (well…I archived them) and using test tones I’m not seeing the discrepancy now.
I’ve had other weird issues related to the prefs. My latency (without artifacts) had slowly grown to the point where regardless of track or dsp use I couldn’t reliably use anything lower than a 192 buffer at 88khz. I created a new Mac profile all together and that help enormously. I’m able to reliably use 128 now which yields a combined in/out latency of 6 or 7ms which is enough. Part of creating the new mac profile of course was that I got brand new Nuendo prefs in the process. I’m curious to see what new nuendo prefs in my old mac profile do for performance.
Another issue I just had last week was on a pretty large mix, my UAD DSP was close to maxing out and the client wanted a Waves plug that I didn’t own so I bought the plugin and with various deals they had got 3 more for $9 extra. I installed all 4 new Waves plugins. All of a sudden the mix project would crash while loading. It WOULD load if I disabled all 3rd party plugs. The error message I got said something about a UAD GUI not loading properly. Sure enough, I found that if I loaded a different project first with UAD plugs (from a computer restart) I could then close it and load the mix project and it would open, so it seems to be a UAD issue.
In the same project I’m using about 14 external FX - some stereo busses and some mono. One stereo send in particular would randomly offset either the left or right send by 6.5db. It wasn’t always the same side, and it didn’t happen every time - the change occurred with new boots of nuendo and re-opening the project. I was able to compensate with the output faders in the Lynx Mixer, but…very strange and troubling.
Again, hopefully clean prefs will help.