Resistor Noise Can Be Deafening, and Hard to Reduce (2007)
My only experience with this is building and designing guitar amps, which often have 80dB of gain or more, a.k.a., a pain in the ass amount of gain to deal with. It's not something on par with, say, radio astronomy, but it's still a lot of gain to deal with.Usually the main source of noise will be a 120Hz or 100Hz buzz, but with humbucking pickups and careful orientation of the guitar you can mostly eliminate that. The next source of noise will be a low-level white noise (sounds like a hiss), which is from the amplifier, and consists of a mixture of Johnson noise and shot noise.In older amps you may hear a louder hiss/crackle which is from old carbon comp resistors, which is an inferior type of resistor that produces additional noise through a different mechanism.If you're trying to record your guitar directly through a digital interface, you may run into clipping issues and have to enable the pad (a built-in attenuator). Unfortunately, my experience is that the pad often introduces an unacceptable amount of noise, and I believe that it's just plain Johnson noise from a resistive divider.