I talked to a Waves representative the other day and asked him a couple of questions about the Waves APA units. He told me that the APA 32 is a noisy little box, they say it´s designed for "machine rooms", which actually means that it has a couple of very noisy fans running all the time.
The APA 32 is supposed to be built from off-the-shelf PC server components that require quite some cooling. The APA 44 however is supposed to be built around a custom design that doesn´t need active cooling and therefore is quiet, albeit a good deal more expensive...
That´s no good news, the APA 44 is considerably more expensive than the APA 32, compared to the improved performance of "only" 30 percent compared to the APA 32.
Today I called a shop that already has a couple of APA 32 in store and asked them about the noise level of the APA 32. They told me the unit was about as noisy as an dual processor G4, and that is pretty noisy indeed. Too much to have it sitting besides your desk.
toby