This is totally placebo. Ableton is completely transparent for audio as long as no audio stretching is involved. You have to be careful though because if you do

This is totally placebo. Ableton is completely transparent for audio as long as no audio stretching is involved. You have to be careful though because if you don't configure audio clips the right way and do route them through the time stretching algorithms you will definitely lose some sound quality. Probably Live's biggest problem in this regard is that it doesn't make it as clear as it could that this kind of stretching is going on.