Disabled Blocks Effect on Signal/Tone

[hoyanchan]

I just read elsewhere, a comment that said disabled blocks "diminish tone". I found this surprising as an unused effect can be completely bypassed in software. Is there some kind of bypassed pedal emulation going on, or I'm wrong about how DSP works (I admittedly know nothing about, even though I'm a programmer by trade) ?

[DunedinDragon]

I have no idea where you might have read this, but I've never experienced anything like that in over 4 years with my Helix.  I suspect the user was either hearing things or had some arrangement of blocks in his signal chain that caused it to happen.  It's certainly not an artifact of DSP or anything of that sort.  The only thing that I know of that does anything like that if is you do some form of split in which the signal is lowered by 3db on both sides of the split to accommodate the gain addition of blocks on each side of the split, but that can be adjusted when the split is re-joined where you can add gain if needed to keep the signal level equal to what it was before the split.

[hoyanchan]

Thanks, it was from a Facebook group. I suspected it was bollocks, but wanted to verify it before questioning the guy. I was concerned because I do have disabled blocks that are completely unused. If this were true I'll have to go into many of my patches to delete them. 

[phil_m]

If you have Input Z setting in the Input Block set to Auto, the input impedance will change to match whatever the input impedance of the pedal modeled in the first block is. For most effects, this is still 1 Mohm, so it doesn’t make a difference. But for some effects, it’s lower. When this happens, the lower impedance setting will stay active whether the first block is bypassed or not. I suspect this is what the Facebook post was talking about.