On casual listening, I've heard subtle differences between DAWs over the years, but it's purely a subjective and unscientific impression. I find it interesting that so many people for so many years have reported, and continue to report, similar impressions. Are we all victim to some sort of mass auditory hallucination?
As a matter of fact, yes we are. Start with watching the one hour video I quoted earlier in this thread, to learn more. I used to know a link to a great site that explains it even better, but I lost track of it now. But basically, our built in survival instinct
INTENTIONALLY changes our ear's hearing response routinely and frequently, based on psychological factors. It does this because our body thinks it needs to hear differently in order to increase our chance of survival. It is beyond our conscious control. Our perceptions and biases weigh heavily into how we actually hear things..its not purely psychological....what our brain receives as information is actually different, from minute to minute.
Our ears cannot be trusted for this kind of comparative analysis. It's not that our ears are not sensitive enough, its that our ears are just entirely unreliable to be consistent enough to determine much of anything other then whether we like it right now or not.
That's why any kind of discussion on this topic....needs to be accompanied by scientific emphirical data, otherwise its basically meaningless. Enjoy the DAW you like the most and don't worry about it so much, they are all great platforms.
Anyway, if DAWs do indeed have slight differences in sound, then ultimately so what? For decades music has been produced on various analog consoles and tape that all imparted their own character.
+1
Pure transparency in audio processing is a noble goal, but should there be some coloration imparted by a DAW, it's easy enough to work with, just as you do when working with analog gear. It becomes part of the sound of your studio, and you learn to use it to positive effect.
Its extremely unlikely that any DAW is imparting
ANY coloration to the sound in the raw simple collection of digital audio from plugins and summed to the master bus. Coloration could happen during D/A conversion in your sound card. It could come from using different EQ plugins and other intentionally placed DSP functions(through plugins or other built in features of the DAW designed intentionally to operate DSP on the signal)...
As someone said, even a slightly different gain stage structure could effect the DSP to sound different. Those are all user choices. In playing back a midi instrument, there could be midi filters happening, intentional or not, that scales velocities, which would change the sound produced by the VSTi, or perhaps by default one DAW has a certain CC set to something and the other DAW has a different CC set to something else or no default CC values or something...and the user doesn't realize that the instrument is not being midi controlled quite exactly the same way in the two cases, resulting in different sound. Those are user choices, whether intentional or not.