alnelson1

That would be excellent. I just tried it with a freshly charged battery and a known-good cable. With the level set for the guitar to peak at -4, the noise was audible but did not trigger the lowest segment of the LED VU meter on the interface, labeled -42db. (using RBilly and Chime models again) In Win10/Sonar Pro, assigning the input from the Focusrite to a track, set to unity gain, shows a constant noise floor at -54db, on the bigger VU meter. Adding any compressor or similar effect to the FX buss brings the noise up substantially, requiring gating. Passive pickups are quieter, but being single coils, they have a different kind of noise - a little digital crosstalk, depending on orientation. Not bad or constant. The room is pretty quiet, electrically.

I am envious. These batteries, charged until the red indicator flashes, are only good for 2 or 3 hours. The guitar is not dead silent, by any measure.

Well, yesterday it was a regular TS cable. Battery powered guitar > 1/4" guitar cable > Focusrite interface. I started using the XPS-AB with the supplied wall wart and TRS 1/4" (stereo) cable. Guitar > TRS cable to XPS-AB > TS 1/4" cable > interface. Yesterday's configuration suffered more from constant white, well, pink noise. I had to use heavy gating and the Chime 12 string model had unusual intermodulation distortion. It seemed to be related to battery charge level. I went through 2 batteries in 4 hours of recording. Each battery announced it was nearing its end by increased noise. The previous configuration has, with both Line6 guitars, the classic thunderstorm on AM radio effect, dynamic, random pops, crackles, electrical discharge noises, waves of pure noise and then a period of quiet. It is unpredictable and ruins takes. Feel free to use a technical answer, without simplified explanation. I am fine with that. I had those courses.

I picked up a Variax Standard a few weeks ago, after using an old, bought-used, Chinese Variax for about a year. The old one was an experiment, to see if I would use it from among a dozen other guitars in my home studio. I found it did provide some useful tones, but suffered from all kinds of noise, from AM radio/thunderstorm pops and sizzle to dirty pot crackles and plain old noise floor. I used it, but often had to wait for just the right, random, quiet moment to record. So, I bought a new one. Now I find the noise is just inherent in the design and seems to all be from the power supplies and power delivery. I have the nicer floor box with power and switching but the stereo 1/4" female is weird. If you fully seat the cable, you get random thunderstorm noises. So, I switched to (presumably) clean battery power, but a fully charged, new, battery lasts about one to two hours. As it gets low, the noises, especially white noise, creep in. Any tips form the community on keeping these guitars quiet and reliable? I can't use USB power, since in my current set up the only front mounted USB are used by iLok and WiFi dongle. Man, what I wouldn't give for a Quiet, Hardtail, Line6 modeling "studio" guitar with an XLR out, powered by phantom power.