Settle down folks.
I prefer to analog sum, I couldn't get enough level in dance music production with digital summing. I'd have to continually turn everything else down to get the head room for the kick and bass. Therefore putting most of the other tracks in lower bit land.
I did some tests, bought a decent pre-amp made a summing buss, now I can crank the power right up to top of each DA sub group and MY mixes sound much better now in solid copper wire - unbalanced into my discrete solid state pre-amp. I tried balanced, transformer coupled inputs, tube, behringer (ARGH!) and various cables to come up with MY preference for MY mixing style and MY quality outcome expectations.
This is not to say go ahead and mix digitally, thats up to YOU.
Due to the lack of DAs I own I have to submix alot to each subgroup.
To answer 'what should go into each sub group?' I distribute the bass elements equally to different subgroups. ie, kik to Stereo 1-2, bass1 to Stereo 3-4, bass2 to Stereo 5-6.
Same with high sounds; hats to Stereo 1-2, percussion to Stereo 7-8 etc.
Same with soft smooth pads or reverbs etc, split them up.
So in essence your squeezing each bit of performance out of each sub group DA.
Call me parranoid, but I also like to buss alot out of Cubase to my RME Total mix which is 48BIT and not 32BIT. The Asio drivers are a fixed 32BIT output so each track goes out at closest to digital clipping to the RME digital mixer where the tracks are subgrouped and levelled to each DA subgroup out.
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