first of all, i hope dub machines have been good for you despite this ‘problem'.
secondly, yes, magnetic produces noise constantly. so this ‘problem’ is actually a ‘feature’, believe it or not
if the “Noise” slider is greater than 0%, noise is prominent and controllable. It is actually specific tape machine emulation noise that was present on the hardware devices even when not running any audio through them.
a tip to discover the noise:
- keep your spectrum device after the Magnetic device
- with no audio input, turn ‘Mix’ to 100%
- turn the ‘Noise’ slider up to 100%
- open the Magnetic ‘Breakout Button’ so you can see the advanced choices
- now click on the different ‘Character’ tabs, slowly…
- …you will hear a switching between different types of machine noise…
- …but now, with one character tab selected, choose either a tape only mode in the ‘Mode Selector’ (modes 1 - 4), then choose a with-reverb mode (modes 5 - 11)…
- …you will also hear the noise profiles change
other settings which affect the noise:
- whilst listening to these different noises, you can move the ‘Repeat’, ‘Wow’ & ‘Character Slider’ controls to hear how the noise morphs depending on tape machine settings.
- with no external audio input, it is possible to turn up the ‘Intensity' dial (and maybe turn down the ‘Repeat’ dial) and ‘self-oscillate' the entire device, so that is is acting like a filter of some kind.
as you can probably tell, all this was researched and studied and emulated in code with great detail. but this does not help your problem
as long as ‘Noise’ % slider is down at 0 %, and the ‘Character Slider’ in the ‘Breakout’ section is at 25 % or less, noise will never be greater than -110dB (below human hearing). it is programmed so that is shows activity with recent user interaction, but the noise should disappear completely if those ‘Noise’/‘Character’ sliders are down and ‘Intensity’ is low.
so, i hope you found this informative. if you are experiencing noise problems different to this, please do get in touch with your complete live / max / windows system specs and i’ll try and help you out further.
ultimately, you are not the first person to query our noise-emulation decisions! perhaps we were too faithful to the original ?! let us know what you think (very useful for us for further development).