This is what bugs me off pretty much, with H9 Max and most other digital pedals that has 600K ohms (mono or stereo) input. If you should put your guitar in there, it isn’t the 1 mOhm that is required. Now what on earth has this to do with hiss, and such things? Well it has. Strymons are better at it. If you should put a guitar into any input it must have above the 600 KOhms that Eventide has. IF YOU’RE GOING INTO A FRONT OF ANY TUBE AMP. Otherwise use the fx/send and return.So you have to use a Lehle Sunday Driver or something else that can convert the signal first, before going into the Max H9. This applies just as well to other digital pedals, and is not of any faults of Eventide. Then we have all this +4 db input and -10 db. On top of it all. +4 db are used in mixer and professional studios, and that value has to be the same throughout the chain. -10 db are consumer products, and regardless of that you have this on guitar lead, or not it must stay the same throughout.
If all these things are stuck together, you’ll bet you *ss you have hiss problems and noise problems when in front of the amp. Regardless of that the amp input is at 1 mOhm doesn’t make sense since the Max H9 turns it down to 600 K Ohm anyway. That’s why you have to use a Lehle in front of everything that can bring it up to 4 mOHms if you like, and have a crisp, clear high end without noise. Gain structure matching and keeping it all through the chain is almost impossible, hence the use of buffers.
To balance the Strymons hype bit, they have other problems such as aliasing and heterodyning. Let’s not go there. But by and large, it has to do with some pedals put in front of TimeLine,Big Sky, Blue Sky that has a charge pump built in. To ramp up the voltage to 18v inside. On certain dirt pedals, it has a peak frequency above human hearing range, around 22 Khz. And the filters doesn’t track this or filters it out, so if you use downsampling or any pitch shifter it gets downshifted to within the human hearing range, and since even 17-18 Khz can’t really be heard by us old blokes either, it may very well turn out just as … “hiss”. It is heard as whining when you use shimmer settings on the Strymons. Alas, thinking a tube amp wouldn’t see these frequencies, they pass though fx/send in any amp as well.
