Culprit found..... I think. The session SR was set higher than the hardware would allow. While there were no complaints during playback, the session I guess isn't running at the rate advertised. And then on render, not sure whats happening but thats where the difference occurs.
I haven't tested this yet using hardware that goes all the way to 192k, but I will try to tomorrow. But today using hardware that only goes as far as 96k I can reproduce, and also "fix" the render to match what I'm hearing.
So here's the setup:
192k WAVE file(s)
Session set to 192k
Render to 48k, or 192k - mushy output compared to what I hear in playback.
Now if I set the session rate to 48k, it sounds the same to me on playback as it did set to 192k, at least with the few tests I've done, and all the renders match what I hear in playback as far as I can tell so far.
So the sessions weren't really running at 192k as I thought they were?
Here are screenshots of the exact same session output settings, where the session was first set to 192k, and then to 48k. And the 48k session one matches what I hear in playback.
192k session - mushy - render doesn't match what I hear in playback:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...92kSession.png
48k session - render matches what I hear:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...48kSession.png
So I don't know if this is a bug or not, but I can say interfacing-wise I've been pulling my hair out trying to get my renders to match what I hear in playback.
Regardless what sort of flexibility and great numbers are going on under the hood, I feel like some sort of check needs to be made and the user warned that the output will not match what they've been hearing.