Is TH2 incredibly noisy?

No, you're not alone...

They have modeled the Amps right down to the "noise" that they make....

So, just as in real life, you will have to set up gates and edit to eliminate.

That's just the way they have been modeled.  For "authenticity"

I figured as much on the "authenticity" bit, but I have become pretty spoiled with nice silent emulations.  Wanted to make sure it wasn't something on my end.  I'll suffer through some noise gating to get those tones though.  

Thanks for the confirmation.

Are you guys using the Gate knob in the Master section? It will eliminate the unwanted noise far better than the pedals. At the top of the TH2 GUI click the "Master" button and it will give you global controls... one of which is Gate. It is quite powerful and it eliminated all the idle noise for me when using heavy distortion. As with most gates though you need to find the right balance or it will cut into the tones you actually want. 

If you guys are using the gate already I don't know what could be goin on because it works well here.

The other global knobs are extremely useful for tweaking too. It takes the already good tones of TH2 and makes them better. Particularly messing with the Tone knob. Cheers.

  When you crank up the sauce humbuckers won't stop the noise. I pretty much use humbuckers exclusively and have alway had to control unwanted noise and feedback. It's just something that happens with lots of distortion. 

No problem. It's a bit of a weird program with lots of hidden features but definitely worth the effort of learning properly. I highly recommend opening up the program and reading through the manual while checking everything out. There are quite a few very important aspects that can be easily overlooked if you aren't aware of them. Cheers.

Glad to help. You mentioned having to slip edit your clips. You should be doing this anyway especially when using high gain settings. It just makes the end results much cleaner sounding. There are other ways to approach this though. You can use volume automation or use a setting in Sonar that completely cuts any signal below a certain level however that last one can lead to things being cut that you don't intend to or make the start/ends of the clips sound weird. I ALWAYS slip edit and create fades on my tracks. It takes a bit of time but IMO is totally worth it and it gets you right into the mix with your ears and mind. I was however having some problems in X2 with other random clips being selected other than the one I was working on. Some kind of weird bug. I solved it by using the Clip Lock feature on all the other tracks which does exactly what the name implies. Locks them so the can't be move, deleted, edited, etc... To do this "Select" the track by clicking the track number so it turns blue (you can group select to lock multiple tracks and lock them all at once) then press I on your keyboard to open the Inspector, click the "Clips" tab at the top of the inspector to open the Properties section. Then click the dropdown beside "Lock" and select "Pos/Data" and it will lock all the clips in the track.

More info than was requested but I'm bored. Cheers.

rmix has a cool noise reduction feature that I used on real life amp noise, and it worked well. I also used it to fox a female vocal track where the vocalist was blowing on the microphone. it didn't work when there was only noise.