The Sound Canvas VA uses the same emulated pre-amp circuitry of the late 1990’s from the original hardware. As a result, the moment you have more than one SC-VA plug-in instances routed to an output bus, a measurable noise floor will be observable into Cubase’s mixing bus. Back in the late 1990’s, this would have been acceptable via an analog mixer as such a level was too weak to be detected by our ears.
However if you keep on adding more of the same plug-ins, the noise level will eventually add up & become audible as shown on this table below:
| Number of active SC-VA instances | Main output (dB) |
| 1 | Infinity |
| 2 | -84.5 |
| 3 | -81.0 |
| 4 | -78.5 |
| 5 | -76.5 |
| 6 | -75.0 |
| 7 | -73.6 |
| 8 | -72.5 |
| … | … |
| 97 | -50.8 |
From a purist perpective, the SC-VA through it’s true ’emulation’ of the original SC-8820 retained the same electronic components of its glory days, resulting in the noisy output. Measurably you would get a similar (or perhaps even worse) if using the analog line outs from the actual hardware!
97 Sound Canvas plug-ins is the highest number of instances used for my Project Behemoth. Compared to today’s standard virtual instrument setup, this noise floor at -50db is considered quite noisy, but it is to be expected since almost 100 analog signals are mixed into the Cubase.
A very quick solution to produce absolute silence (i.e minus infinity dB) when there is no sound activity on my Project Behemoth is by turning on the Noise Gate on the output channel strip of your Mix Console. Set the Threshold to slightly higher than the noise floor, e.g -48dB.
In the next posting, I will share the optimum gain staging configuration on multiple SC-VAs, so that the overall output will be loud enough without clipping during playback on all 1500+ instruments but still having adequate headroom for final mixing.
Sound Canvas Purist 