Hey Brian,
Like I said, that box is not doing anything the Axe cannot do, AFAIK. The Axe's filters should be able to eliminate hiss and can be tuned on a per preset basis. I would *love* to see what
@FractalAudio could do to provide an inline automated hiss supressor but you *can* roll your own:
Here is a post I made regarding the noise issues I had with the II as I noted above the III seems even more sensitive (or at least the way I have it rigged at the moment is...)
I frequently have to use my presets in an electrically noisy environment. I frequently get some baseline noise in high gain presets but what drives me insane is noise on an extended note. My presets are setup to kill this hissy high end noise on singing notes without artificially cutting it off... 'Gates' are not really good at *reducing* noise/hiss riding on a signal.
For some reason all of this lives in the high frequency area so my method leverages that:
- For baseline noise: intelligent noise gate set to the minimal thresh and ratio to just stop noise when not playing
- For hissing: Filter block, LPF, Frequency controller attached to envelope.
- CRITICAL: play a note or have someone else do it or loop something and:
- Raise the starting point of the controller curve until it barely covers the noise.
- Change the end point and slope so the filter goes fully transparent quickly as the note rises.
This works better than anything I have tried. I wish every piece of gear/plugin etc I had access to could perform this function. The 'envelope' controller is just brilliant.
So I use a two pronged attack. The gate to truly hard gate the noise floor and this weird active filter to handle HF hiss. Each is application specific and the settings are minimal as possible for the patch. This gives a maximum transparency as these noise things can kill your feel, etc. To me the using VOL to kill noise that just lives at the high end is not nearly as satisfactory. It is too heavy handed and diminishes tone/feel more.
On the II I cherry picked a couple of good configs for the above and saved the blocks in AE. Then I could plop one down and tweak it as per above for high gain presets. It was an okay solution but a lot of noobs are not going to be comfortable with that and like I said, maybe Cliff could work some magic having full access to the internals.
LOL. Now that I think of it maybe this is why my III seems so noisy because I am used to this on the II. As noted above, I love that envelope controller. It is so useful.
For me the entire point of a bleeding edge unit like the III is that it can do everything in the box.Buying a box and putting in the loop etc is like admitting defeat.