virus and preamps?

[Hollowcell]

Most of the time I use the Virus without pre-amps, but sometimes I'll run my gear through a valve - none of the VC only demos on soundclick are run through the valve though.

The only outboard FX used were at mastering the mastering stage on those VC demos. From memory I just used a limiter. As long as there is a chunky enough wave before limiting, noise won't increase.

Which brings me to this point.....

Basicly, once you have set your sound card up properly, make sure when you record you are getting a wave that is as big as it can be without clipping. If the volume of the initail recording is too low, then you will get noise once you beef up the sound later.