@howard @Paul not 100% sure, but I may have found the issue. The ‘power plan’ on my laptop was set to ‘balanced’. I found the following support article and it mentions you have to have it set to ‘high performance’. I’ve just changed it and it seems to be better - at least for now.
Either that, or someone in the house has stopped doing something as I’m getting mixed results when I change the power plan back to ‘balanced’. I’m going to leave it on ‘high performance’ and hope it works.
Nope, I had zero issues. I mean they won’t really sell if they sound like shit haha.
With better you mean it’s gone or that it sounds a bit less annoying? In any case it should be perfect without any noise. It does sound it has something to do with your laptop and I still think it could also be something with your AISO driver… In the past I struggled a lot with Window’s balance plan for cooling my computer.
For now I just hope you can enjoy the plugins! 
Thanks Paul, I tried the demo of Kuassa Cerberus before buying it and they deliberately add a noise every 40seconds until you buy it so was just guessing 
I think the crackle has gone, but will try some more tomorrow. Some of the Petrucci high gain presets had a fair bit of hiss, but think that’s normal and probably just needs the noise gate turning up.
Still need to play with the bass plugins. Might hold off purchasing Darkglass or Parallax (they might still be on sale when I wake up as I’m in Aus (UTC+9). I got some reasonably heavy sounds using the BOD with Cerberus which might get me by until I learn how to use them better and get a better understanding of mixing bass.
Ah yes, high gain and and hiss is very normal. I always use my noise gate on subtle settings.
Neural has at least two sales in a year. I would recommend buying plugins only on sale since the price drop is usually very steep. This goes for any plug-in really.
Yes. Never buy plugins at full price.
Not to take the conversation backwards, but the best technique I have been taught when taking Berklee classes, was to pick out the key element of your song/track, bring that up to -4 dB, with a target of -1 to -0.5 db for the overall master. As you bring in other channel strips, just keep that in mind. If you use this method, you will basically preventing any clipping, unless that is something you want in a specific genre (e.g., DnB, dubstep, etc).
Also, make sure to check pre-fader levels to see what is hot there.
I know this is different than what your issue sounds like and the advice you are getting, but wanted to share.
Thanks Sully, always happy to learn.
I tried Darkglass when I got up this morning. Liked some of the sounds I got just flicking through the presets with it going into Cerberus and the sale hadn’t ended yet so got it for 50% off 
Won’t really get to try it out much for about a week, but look forward to seeing what else I can do with it. Even just laying down some basic stuff and playing some riffs on my guitar with Petrucci plugin should be fun.
