From my experience mc really only truly updates and works properly when you restart dsp after making a change. I’m guessing deleting mc.Stereo gave it a refresh and that’s why it changed to 16
also, in your example it’s still sending 16 chans after deleting stereo, just the first four are 440 and the rest are 0.
try to nail down your chans exactly or give yourself some room to go up before turning on dsp. The max channels is 1024 or something like that.