Our A/B comparisons show playback of high resolution audio tracks, e.g., 24bit depth at 96k or 192k, have improved fidelity when every section of the Cubase mixer has been (manually) bypassed. This is with no plugins or DSP dialed into the mixer. We manually activate the yellow bypass icons in the channel strip and then manually bypass any other sections like the preamp on the mixer channel.
We don’t really use Cubase plugins or the Cubase mixer channel strip. We start off with nothing other than the minimal bus setup to route the stereo output to the audio interface and then add 3rd party plugins. So we would like to start mixing from a template showing YELLOW bypass icons across the board for everything in the Cubase mixer.
Nothing added in a section of the mixer should not preclude enabling bypass; the user should be able to override that initial state by clicking bypass and turn the WHITE color of the insert section icon on the mixer channel to YELLOW (along with the same indicator in channel settings). That allows having a bypass indication everywhere for those who prefer to work that way. It does not make sense that with no DSP set in the mixer some sections already allow you to bypass while others do not.
It’s frustrating that after setting manual bypasses, Cubase won’t restore some yellow bypass indicators in channel settings after closing and re-opening the project. I presume it would not be hard to remedy saving this state and provide the option to engage bypass with or w/o plugins added.