are you sure it is the noise floor of the amp ?

sometimes noise can be aggravated by the way you have connected a balanced output to a non-balanced output

I haven't googled the Samson Servo 170 and I don't know what desk you have,
so I could be way off here

Thanks for the reply.

Might be some dodgy wiring.

I'm using a sountracs quartz 48 channel desk with 3 octapre le's running into RME HSDP 96/56 via ADAT. Onto a dual G5 running logic.

I have ordered a Word Clock generator to get rid of any sync issues.

I can't see that this amp is noisy

85W into 4 ohms is a little light when you want good level and still lots of headroom

for listening to compressed and maximised music it will be fine but for early in the recording proccess and for uncompressed material in general,
it will be a little light.

this is where some control is required
some desks have an output attenuator (rotary switch) that allows for the varied levels of a couple of channels all the way through to a full desk of channels

It's all about gain structure

The Rane site has some good articles on this.
Get an old Crown Amp manual and see what they have to say about connections and level setting.

the 170 has
Balanced 1/4" TRS inputs
Unbalanced RCA inputs

basically
have a CD in inputs 1 and 2 and set for a healthy to strong level at the output
now bring up the 170 pots to the loudest you can stand without clipping.

mute channels 1 and 2 (with all other channels muted)

you should not have noise to speak of

Cool will give it a try tomorrow

chris