External Sends

Hi all. I'm using an extra output from my pci sound card as a Send to an external Korg rack tuner. I put the Send to that output in the track, turn it on and all is well. But I have shut the Send off when I'm tuned up because somehow or the other the send is acting like it has an active return. It affects the volume of the track. I don't have any hardware return from the Korg tuner. I'm stumped as to how the Send is getting back in. It does it while recording and on playback. I thought I would need a physical Return for Sonar to behave like this. Thanks

Yeah it does. I still like the Korg. It's huge compared to the on screen tuner. It can be seen across a room.

Yes, some onboard sound cards default to monitoring the output (a.k.a. Steroeo Mix or What U Hear) instead of an input (Mic/Line). If some other track routed to the soundcard is being input monitored, the output to the tuner will be included in that. Some onboard cards don't even allow disabling this, but if it has a mic/line monitoring mode, that would be the way to go.
 
Other than that, sending to a secondary physical output that has no path back to SONAR or direct or to your monitoring sytsem should not be a problem. I do it all the time with a send from my Master bus to a tape machine that has nice big VU meters I like to turn on to get the proper studio ambience.