routing audio in cubase, recording affected/tweaked/optimized audio as wav/aif

[supernova777]

one of the best features i love about Ableton Live is the ability to route the midi/audio between my channels
for instance, i can have a vst loaded up on a *midi* track, drag a compressor/distortion plugin onto that midi channel which gets added to the effect chain for that channel
and then i can create an additonal *audio* track and select its input to be the output of my midi track/vst.... and i can record as wave audio, the output of this virtual synth..
in real time (ie: listening at the same time... without having to stop the music, and press file export etc, and then load up a file browser and deal with filenames etc etc)

is there anyway to do this with cubase?
im guessing the only way to do it would be to use a physical loopback (which takes up my physical channels x2, 1 input, 1 output)