Totally confused!

[robertbriggs]

Well, I'll tell you. Talk about being totally confused when starting out in this business. Every music store I go to has a completely different answer or recommendation on what equipment I should buy or use or just throw away. I started in this because I play bass in a garage band and wanted to record ourselves so we could play back and fix our sound. Well the problem is I used to manage a stereo store that sold Mission, B&W, etc, and got my ears spoiled so now if it's not clean, I'm not happy. You know blah, blah Blah. I've now spent about $5000.00 in new and used equipment trying to put a versatile system together but if you don't know the lingo, forget about the manuals. Every store misleads me, so "Help".I want to record live in my garage/sound room and burn to disc. Then I would like to play back and possibly mix the sound to improve it. I have a 16 channel Behringer mixer xenyx 1622fx with a usb audio interface,
Behringer ultragraph pro FBQ1502 eq. and a Fostex D-160, 16 track digital multitrack recorder. Also a Motu 2408 adat 16 channel interface for the computor. Whats the best or proper way to hook these items together? On playback should I go from the computor outputs to monitors or a power amp to pa spkrs. I also play back music we listen to from a cd player to the mixer. My computor has a Yamaha surround computor amp that I have disconnected the front spkrs and plugged my pwr. monitors into(M audio BX5),sounds like crap. I need a functional outlay on how a sound system should be hooked up so I can start over. Thank you,Stressed and mislead but still hoping for help.
Rob