I use Adobe and don't have a problem opening the 1x4 file. But i have pretty much given up on 96 recording and do everything @ 48. Personally I like the mono x 4 setting to load things into multitrack that way I can control pan on each track or set it to be two stereo tracks. If I were to use stereo x 2 I'd have to split the stereo tracks to do that which would involve an extra step. I do a lot of on stage matrix's and find that it sometimes is better to not pan something full L/R as in a stereo track. Of course everyone has different tastes and different reasons/applications. It would seem to me that the 4 channels into one would still be a huge amount of data, comparable to monox4.