Yep. What you hear is what you get. Question is, why do they sound crappy? It could potentially be a sound card issue, which won't affect the actual sound, but will affect what you hear.
Can you define "crappy" and define what you've got in your system, and explain what it is that you are doing?
i got a 1.4 athlon with 640 ram and an m-audio delta sound card. plenty for what i'm trying to do.
i tried to modify event speed, which led to a nasty echo. then i tried lowering the gain on an event and this created distortion. what i'm wondering is whether this cleans up once it's rendered or if vegas fx processing is just bad.
Modifying sound event speeds is difficult at best. Not that Vegas processing is "bad" in fact, it's currently the best resample of any tool on any platform. Acid invented the concept of timestretch on computers. If you are taking event speed farther than the resample information will allow, or if the original sample was inferior, you should expect problems.
if it's crappy because your system isn't fast enough, then no, it won't carry over when you render.
if it's crappy because you shot crap with your camcorder, then yes, it will sound just as bad when you render.
-nate
If any other programs are running in the background, they may cause glitches. If the latency is set too high on your card, real time effects may start glitching as the computer is having to work harder to run sound and video.
Finally, if you have broadband, turn it off while working with sound. On my machine it always causes glitches if I leave it on while working.