Charley, I bow to your vastly superior experience in this arena, but honestly I expected such a response from you. One thing that I neglected to mention in my previous post is all those mixers save one came out of churches. So no smoke residue and probably fairly low dust environments. Makes me wonder what they upgraded to. Heh. Probably XR12/16/18/32.

My DAW is built around Cakewalk Sonar Platinum (now Cakewalk by Bandlab). I have a free copy of Studio One v3, which I actually like quite a bit. It has some distinct user-friendly advantages over Cakewalk. But I frequently use Cakewalk's musical notation window for composition and editing, whereas Studio One lacks any musical notation capability. Yes, one can purchase Notion v6 (or later?) and use it as a rewire device to export musical notation into SO, but why do I need to go to all the extra expense? And not only that, I don't find Notion particularly easy to use. So I'll keep muddling forward with Cakewalk, and hopefully I can fix this problem I'm having with it not wanting to play with my external MIDI devices.

I guess it's time to go get my ducats lined up and think about who and where to purchase the XR12 from.

Best,
Michael

My Music:
https://soundcloud.com/michaelmcbroom/albums