I'm wondering if people have opinions on bouncing together similar tracks with plugins added to another file, then bringing that file in and deleting the bounced tracks from a project to save CPU.

I've been using some of the Waves plugins and they seem to suck up the cycles. We had been grouping several guitars to a bus, several vocals to another bus, so it seemed to make sense to do render those groups.

However, I wonder if there are any repercussions I should know about. I'm not real clear on when and how important dithering is, ie. am I losing any quality by rendering to 16-bit and using that in the final mix? My instinct is no, but I'm afraid I'm missing some digital subtlety.

Also, a friend suggested to me that the work that Vegas has to do as it sums the signal of dozens of tracks loses some of the information (ie. music) that's there. He said that if instead of summing 8 tracks in Vegas, he output those 8 tracks to his card's 8 outs and into a mixer, the stereo separation was better, the sound clearer, etc. I was flabbergasted! I'd always assumed that nothing got lost in the "mix".

Any comments, thoughts?

Thanks,

Jack