see, what's weird is that, on closer analysis, the guitars are actually nulling. which indicates that the file that's outputted is not actually a clean render. i don't know how to make sense of that. did i render a mix without saving it? i have no recollection of this, and it's very uncharacteristic of me. but it's just about the only thing that makes any sense.

well...i suppose that the corruption in the device may have been bus related. but i think that's kind of stretching it.

dropping this external mixing hypothesis is proving difficult. if i can create a mix that nulls without modifying the master volume or eq, i'm left with a head-scratching paradox. but, that seems to be exactly what i'm in the process of doing.

even this doesn't make sense. the file save date on the project is june 29. the render is dated at basically the same time. there's no space for shenanigans. and these aren't things you can easily fake.

but, if this corruption on the bus is a real thing, what i may be doing is manually reconstructing it. i could have output the file through these corrupt buses, which could be the cause of the warped output.

i suppose that would reduce the initial issue to a cubase problem. it seems remote, but i can't argue with the obvious.

more testing is required.

i can't prove there was actually a driver problem until i wiped the registry. there was some other unknown problem before that.