Mixing "In The Box"?

[Rockmanus]

Hi everyone,
I've been doing this record on Cakewalk Po Audio 9, and I've been noticing that when my tracks push the meters a bit within Cakewalk everything is rounded off pretty well and things are sounding pretty good, but when I mixdown to WAV and listen to these same songs in something like Sound Forage the tracks are considerably muddier than what I was hearing in Cakewalk. I'm guessing the export function in Cakewalk handles peak-level distortion differently than it does for real-time listening. It's actually starting to get a little counter-productive, as mixes that I thought were slightly and nicely distorted are coming back to me as near-mush, and bringing the master faders down is leaving the mixes somewhat lame sounding. I could probably find some decent distotion plug-in or something but like everyone I'm trying to not over-process these songs to death.
So do all DAWs suffer from this stuff? Should I jump ship for the next record? How's pro-tools when it comes to mixing "in the box". Do I even have that terminology right?
I've heard you guys bitch about DAT machines and I don't have the room in my teeny little apartment for any magnetic tape machines, though I wish I did. What do you guys do?
Thanks!

[Al_Huero]

If I understand you right, you're "pushing the meters" past unity gain within Cakewalk? This is a digital no-no, leading to clipping. You can't push digital signals the same way you would analog. Try putting a limiter or compressing your master bus signal to increase the overall level without going red.

[Rockmanus]

Well, I'm hitting the "red" in the main fader meters in CW but there's no digital clipping sound-wise. And again, for most songs it actually sounds better a little tapered off. Basically it's being slightly compressed, I assume by the outputs in Cakewalk.

[Al_Huero]

If you don't have a plug-in installed, there's no compression going on as with analog tape. That red on your master fader is probably the source of your problems when you bounce down.