Ten to one you guys are using the Sonar master for output to whatever you output to, if at all as it seems most people today are probably exporting. We DO NOT. We send stems to the 16 channel Lynx Aurora. Most projects have very high track counts. A short routing example,
Outboard console stereo channels 1&2 - All drum tracks are always summed to these channels BUT are fed first into a Sonar DRUM buss. The individual drum tracks have sends fed to a convolution reverb DRUM VERB BUSS which in turn is also outputted to the DRUMS buss in Sonar. We do this because a great old compressor lives on these mixing console channels AND it give us the chance to do final eq touchup using the console.
Outboard console stereo channels 3&4 - All guitar tracks are always BUSSED to a GUITAR BUSS in Sonar. That BUSS feeds directly into Lynx channels 3&4. This BUSS will also usually have other GUITAR EFFECTS BUSSES fed from the Sonar GUITAR tracks auxes feeding into it.
Lead vocal always is on track 5 and is fed to Lynx channel 5 which is in turn fed to mixing console channel 5.
And so on. We do a variation on mixing in the box and get the best of both worlds by using stems.
If you run the system as outlined above you might find Sonar works differently than you think.
FWIW, we never use the Sonar master buss, that is, the default buss that Sonar inserts for anything and consider it totally useless when using a outboard mixing console and large number of convertor channels available. The 2 channels on the Sonar default master won't do the job for us.