Stereo Out stops working

I’m seeing an issue where the Stereo Out channel has stopped passing signal. The meters on the Stereo Out channel in the mixer are moving, but no sound (also no meter movement in the RME mixer software). A few pieces of info:

1.) I don’t think it’s a hardware/driver issue. I can create a new bus, assign it to the same physical outs and get sound. That new bus is identical in every way that I can see to the non-functional Stereo Out bus.
2.) I don’t think it’s a plugin issue. There are no plugins on the stereo bus, and no inserts in the signal path.
3.) I don’t think it’s a routing issue. I’m testing by assigning the exact same signal to the new bus that I created and Stereo Out.

The triggering event may have been one of two things (but I’m not sure.) I disabled an instrument track, and opened the “Import / Tracks from Project…” window (cancelled without importing anything though).

After reloading the project, the Stereo Out bus worked as expected.

The only thing I can think of is a dropout of your audio interface, i.e. a momentary turn off. The next time it happens, open your Studio tab and then the Setup tab. Open your ASIO tab and see what is connected (or not). If it’s changed to the Generic ASIO driver then it would indicate that your RME device wasn’t available. Of course you can reselect it here and all will be good.

In my setup, if I fail to turn on my audio interface before turning on, I loose my ASIO connection to my device (Mackie) and it faults to the Generic ASIO driver (which is connected to nothing) and I experience what you are experiencing.

At first I thought it might be something like that, but everything’s good w/ the interface/driver. I can create a new output bus connected to the same outputs and it works.