Hello,
It's a total matter of taste, but I have found that letting the emulated 50hz/60hz hiss (don't know if "hiss" is the consecrated term) ON gives you the feeling of something more "realistic". It's plain stupid in essence, cause it's just a parasite artifact, but it gives some artificial warmth I like. It recreates the noise floor which you may not have if you are using a synth vsti for example. It pleases my ear by sometimes giving it a signature sound of "real" recorded music.
A few months ago, I discovered why I was always putting a noisegate in the end of some of my tracks in order to get the noise floor to be "perfect" when no instrument or sound is playing, until I understood it wasn't just compression or any internal noise, but my plugins virtual hiss.
Since then, on my waves ssl or cla compressors, I let them always ON, unless I wanna have something 100% transparent and clean (which means : when there is no sound IN in zero channel on the whole mixer, the output is -inf). With a few compressors, it's really quickly obvious. And if you have many tracks on your mixer with at least one instance of this noisefloor, like if you are using a console emulation on all your tracks, it's obvious too.
If ever you don't know what I mean, listen to this : If you have the album, go listen to it cause youtube sucks it a lot. I'm talking about the noisefloor that is tremendous on this track but gives it its authentic sound. In this case, it's all 100% high end analogue work, so I guess they didn't have the choice anyway.
As I wasn't aware of that, I thought maybe some other here aren't either, or don't "play" with it as much as I do today, so I thought it was worth posting it.
It's a total matter of taste, but I have found that letting the emulated 50hz/60hz hiss (don't know if "hiss" is the consecrated term) ON gives you the feeling of something more "realistic". It's plain stupid in essence, cause it's just a parasite artifact, but it gives some artificial warmth I like. It recreates the noise floor which you may not have if you are using a synth vsti for example. It pleases my ear by sometimes giving it a signature sound of "real" recorded music.
A few months ago, I discovered why I was always putting a noisegate in the end of some of my tracks in order to get the noise floor to be "perfect" when no instrument or sound is playing, until I understood it wasn't just compression or any internal noise, but my plugins virtual hiss.
Since then, on my waves ssl or cla compressors, I let them always ON, unless I wanna have something 100% transparent and clean (which means : when there is no sound IN in zero channel on the whole mixer, the output is -inf). With a few compressors, it's really quickly obvious. And if you have many tracks on your mixer with at least one instance of this noisefloor, like if you are using a console emulation on all your tracks, it's obvious too.
If ever you don't know what I mean, listen to this : If you have the album, go listen to it cause youtube sucks it a lot. I'm talking about the noisefloor that is tremendous on this track but gives it its authentic sound. In this case, it's all 100% high end analogue work, so I guess they didn't have the choice anyway.
As I wasn't aware of that, I thought maybe some other here aren't either, or don't "play" with it as much as I do today, so I thought it was worth posting it.
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