Just playing around, I found that turning on the various buss sends (vox, guitars, drums etc) and sending them to the Master (as well as outputting to Master) seems to crisp up the tracks.
Further, "Sending" the Master to the sound card (as well as "outputting" to it of course) does the same thing.
I get a better, louder sound without adding to the meter levels.
Is this a case of "if it sounds better, it is better", or am I doing something wrong that will come back to bite me?

If you're just sending the signal through one or more busses without changing gain or other processing, the final output should be exactly identical to the original input.

If I'm reading it right, he's SENDING from the busses to the master and also routing the buss OUTPUTS to the master, so you'll get a 6dB increase overall.

I can't think of a scenario where it would be desirable to do both.

Disable the sends.

I'm surprised that it's even possible to insert a send to bus that the output is already routed to.  You certainly can't do it Sonar 7, where the Insert Send menu option always excludes buses already routed to.  The restriction seems sensible to me.  Why have they changed this?

Must have been changed right after 7, you can output and send to the same bus in Sonar 8.

You can even have multiple sends from the same track to the same bus. I can't imagine why you'd want to, but I've done it before - inadvertently, of course. All it takes is to not notice that you have multiple tracks selected when you insert a Send. If any one of those other selected tracks already has a send to that bus, you end up with two sends to the same bus. 

M_Glenn_M


Just playing around, I found that turning on the various buss sends (vox, guitars, drums etc) and sending them to the Master (as well as outputting to Master) seems to crisp up the tracks.
Further, "Sending" the Master to the sound card (as well as "outputting" to it of course) does the same thing.
I get a better, louder sound without adding to the meter levels.
Is this a case of "if it sounds better, it is better", or am I doing something wrong that will come back to bite me?

did anyone else catch the " I get a better, louder sound without adding to the meter levels." part?? my guess, glen is that you've got some compression and eq on the master that's totally SQUASHING the input.

I think he's getting a louder sound because of the doubled up effect of having the send AND the output routed to the same buss.

Better is purely subjective, but could of course be down to compression

Busted on the compression Swamptooth. 
I'm using the Concrete limiter and the PC4K comp. for controlling the master levels. I'm a bit enamoured of the Conc Limiter as it seems to add the right tone for my vox.
I get the doubling up idea now and that's probably it too, but it doesn't seem to add distortion at the monitors, just clarity. 
I guess it's a bit like parallel compression, sending unsquashed signal past the master limiter and compressor?
So is this a bad thing if it's not distorting at the monitors?
IOW is it better to reduce the limiter and comp instead?

It's a bad thing in that you've got a 6dB increase in volume where you shouldn't, irrespective of whether it distorts or not.

If you want the extra volume you should address this by raising the level of individual tracks or busses, not by inserting a send from busses to master.