It's been established a few times that the Pro Channel flow is top down. 
 
Cakewalk officielaly reccomends that the Console Emutation module is first in your signal chain:

 
 
So WHY do they have it LAST in the signal chain as default? And I'm wondering - do any Pro Channel users move it up to the top, as Cakewalk states it's best to place it?
 

Redux indeed Gavin:) There have been quite a few discussions about this. There are no hard and fast rules;  some place it first, some last, and some don't use it at all:)

tenfoot
Redux indeed Gavin:) There have been quite a few discussions about this. There are no hard and fast rules;  some place it first, some last, and some don't use it at all:)

I agree 100% :-)
 
I just wonder why Cakey would make the recommendation, yet not follow it by default. It's compfusing for a guy like me. 

I settled in on last, several years ago, where my ears think it sounds, accumalatively, best. If you read the second part of the recommendation, I like everything to run through the Consule.

One thing that Samplitude made right - a dialog where the built in stuff is shown in gray, and you can decide where in the chain your own plugins goes. Just move up/down kind of approach in the list.
 
One thing that Cakewalk did right - Mixrecall to try out different spots to put it.
Did so with Waves NLS and like first position best with console emulation, like when audio came from console - anything more needed you do it on that sound.

When I first started using SONAR (relatively new user), I watched this video from Craig Anderton.  In it, he recommends that it be last in the chain.  Later on, I read the Cakewalk section that says to put it first, but by then, I was already used to putting it in last (and it's last in all my templates).  I do wonder about the two different recommendations though.  The "trim" knob sort of suggests to me that the emulator should be first in the chain.

The reason why I put the emulator last is because back in the day of big consoles, the kind of effects put in the ProChannel (like compression and EQ) were either before the mix bus, or channel inserts that were also before the mix bus. 
 
However...remember there are two components to console emulation, transformer emulation and non-linearities. Non-linearities will have the most overall effect if at the end. Transformer emulation is something else, depending on whether you want to have a transformer at the input whose character then gets processed, or at the end, where the "clean" signal gets character. 
 
One of my favorite Console Emulation tricks is using it as an effect on bass by turning the drive way up and "saturating" the "transformer." The primary transformer distortions and character happen in the bass range, so it's a natural for processing bass (including synth bass). For this, you want it at the beginning.
 
So as has been said many times, where to put the Console Emulator is a matter of personal taste. But the more clearly you understand how it works, the easier it is to apply in an appropriate manner.

I appreciate this thread very much... thanks for clarifying Craig... I just learned the "why", which helps with the "how"