Thanks for the insight, David. I have been using Cakewalk since 1995, when putting the instrument in the FX bin was the only way to use softsynths. I was aware that instrument tracks and the Synth Rack were added later, but putting the instruments in the FX bin was what I was used to doing and and it worked for me, so I never explored it much. Now that I'm trying to be better about my gain staging, I guess I'll have to catch up the the rest of the world.
I followed your instructions and put a TTS-1 in the Synth Rack and am using it to feed an audio track. With the TTS-1 turned all the way up, I am having to set the track Input Gain to positive 13, which seems like a lot, to get an RMS level of -18 dB and peak level of -9 dB. I'm using the FreeG metering plugin to get those numbers. The synth is playing a MIDI sequence where all the note velocities are 100.
Does that seem normal that I would need to turn up the synth that much? Maybe it's just because the TTS-1 is an ancient product and doesn't have an audio output control?
Thanks very much for your help.