I don’t think so… the point, to avoid denormals, is to add a very small non-zero signal. Silent.ar renders as DC.ar(0) – therefore sig + Silent.ar(1) will be equivalent to sig and the reverb result would be unchanged, denormals and all.
In any case… FreeVerb seems not to do anything about denormals.
At the server level, there’s sc_SetDenormalFlags() (“// Set denormal FTZ [‘flush-to-zero’] mode on CPUs that need/support it”). On my machine (Intel CPU), I don’t get denormals – so this is definitely working in some/many environments. Perhaps Apple Silicon needs different flags…?
hjh