There are a number of other ways to hook mine up but honestly, my tone isn't being affected that much by the NS-50, and on the threshold I'm way above the point where light playing will suffer with the chitter MJMP mentioned in this thread earlier.
The two gates thing I have a theory might be beneficial in regards to guitar resonance that can sometime keep your normal single gate open long enough to allow feedback, where as if you have a gate before distortion also it's going to snub that lagging resonance on the head before it gets a chance to develop into something nasty. Just a theory.
Hey Soloist, yeah that is similar my man, my rack noise gate is like the rack version of the ns-2, couldn't say if it was better, I do rate it highly though. Since my GX700 has built in noise reduction I suppose I could stick that on lightly somewhere, perhaps before the loop where my preamp is.
I also have a hush IICX I guess I could in theory use this like two gates since that is what it is
Go into channel 1 and have that cover before any distortion then use channel II like normal. I really like this Hush unit. It's from 1989 or something but sounds awesome in my opinion.