Firstly I’m typing this without my glasses on, so apologies in advance for any typos!
I have a lot to learn about setting levels / clipping / gain staging etc with any device, let alone the QC, however there is one thing that really puzzles me; why is it that some speakers give out a distortion that I can only describe as a crackling noise (sometimes even when using a clean amp model) and others don’t? To clarify, when I say ‘speakers’ I’m talking about FR type speakers or desktop stereo speakers, not guitar amp speakers.
I have always presumed that the noise I’m describing was caused by a faulty speaker. In my experience it’s even possible to have two identical speakers and one makes the crackling noise and the other doesn’t.
Today while trying out a pair of the new Headrush FR Go speakers I was puzzled when one sounded very clear with no unwanted noise, but the other one crackled a lot.
I initially assumed this speaker was faulty but playing around a bit more I realised that there was some unwanted noise even on the good speaker occasionally.
I then tried something that I I’ve always been led to believe we shouldn’t do on the QC, and I turned the master volume down to about 75.
The sound immediately’cleaned up’ (even when using a distorted amp model, like a Marshall. I find that it’s possible to differentiate between intentional distortion and unwanted distortion and when I turned the master volume down on the QC I get only the intentional one).
What puzzles me though is that to the best of my basic knowledge even when the volume was at 100, there was no clipping of levels, but there was a clearly audible crackling noise (another way to describe it would be like a buzzing noise, similar to the angry wasp noise you used to get when turning up the gain on early solid state amps).
The other thing that puzzles me is that some of my presets do this, and some of the ones that do it worst can oddly be ones that use quite clean amps, whereas some of the higher gain presets may not produce this noise (although I appreciate that an amp model with a lot of gain does disguise the unwanted noise. One way to describe it would be like an ‘artifact’ so after the intentional gain has subsided you can still hear the cracking/buzzing noise).
Has anyone else experienced this and / or have any advice please?
Thanks everyone