Although many of these environments are comparable in their abilities to produce high-quality audio, their differences and specialties are what draw users to a particular platform.
This article compares noteworthy audio synthesis environments, and enumerates basic issues associated with their use.
Audio synthesis environments comprise a wide and varying range of software and hardware configurations.
Although people can of course prefer one system's "sound" over another, perhaps the best output can be determined by using sophisticated audio analyzers in combination with the listener's ears.
One issue may be which interface metaphors are used (e.g. boxes-and-wires, documents, flow graphs, hardware mixing desks).