Wednesday, June 09, 2021
Ask Jonah: Answering Reader Questions About Direct (DI) Boxes
ProSoundWeb: Passive DIs provide complete signal isolation due to their transformer and can operate without a power source. Active DIs need power (generally either phantom or batteries), can supply gain to the signal, and can have an extremely high input impedance, which is a must for certain sources such as piezos.
Both types can handle the important tasks of balancing a signal and better matching (technically “bridging”) the impedance between the source and the mic preamp.
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1 comment:
I had a basic understanding of what a DI Box does before reading this article, but Jonah answered some questions I didn’t even know I had!
A DI Box takes an unbalanced, high impedance signal and convert it to a balanced, low impedance signal. I’ve used it for connecting a guitar or a keyboard to a board. There are passive and active DI boxes! As with all electronic components, passive means it can operate without a power source. Alternatively, active DIs need power through phantom or batteries. The author said generally you can use active DIs on passive sources and passive DIs on active sources. A tube DI can act as a pseudo guitar amp, and provide the “warmth” or feeling that a certain guitar amp can.
This was a great article to read because it went into some of the impedance specifications. I’ve recently been researching impedance and how it relates to speaker amps! Since DI boxes also are a form of amplification, it deepened my understanding on that topic.
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