Jack

12k? Child's play I tell ya! £22k EACH.

I had a 2-band twin to that and it was sublime, enjoy it.

I'm not sure they're actually constructive thoughts, mind. Yes indeed. That above picture was from early this summer when my indie band's mongrel PA consisted of the drummer's RCF 712 tops (he doesn't have subs) and our guitarist's Samson sub (he has a full Samson PA in which the tops aren't as good as the RCFs). We've since bought a nice pair of RCF 702s as a band to go under the drummer's tops. In our setup they're a necessity really. That pic above isn't representative as we've all got our big rigs out to be silly with in the marquee but we're usually a really quiet band and we try to put as much through the pa as possible. Without the subs I'd have to be blasting away on stage super loud, and that's going to bleed into all the mics and just ruin everyone's day. This way we're all always at 'drummer loud' on stage and the master fader on the desk just goes up or down depending on the venue. I'm trying to get the guitarists in this band to switch to DIs rather than mics as it's really cleaned up the sound in my other band to no end but it's less pressing as these guys are pretty quiet anyway. These guys, however, are not. Heavier band use an Alto system of two TS115A tops and two TSSUB18 subs. It's alower-quality system perhaps but it sounds great and the subs really do add to that rock music kick drum that adds a lot of energy to a mix. Means I don't need so much amp as well.

The Boss tuner is buffered for sure, so as far as the DI box is concerned, you might as well be playing an active bass. Having said that, given that you can use a passive DI, then I think you're doing the right thing by doing so, one less thing to have to worry about as I find asking for phantom power a real minefield and I don't like relying on battery-powered anything.

True enough, and I'm not one to shout at a waiter when they haven't cooked my food either but the companies clearly don't really care. I've had these two corkers in the past few weeks alone.

Interesting, I hadn't thought of it like that. Are cheaper things just somewhat harsher and rougher around the edges you think? That's a little different I think, the Noble (and the REDDI, RNDI, etc) make a point of "we will make you sound good", rather than a passive DI which tries to be pretty much a perfect replica of the input signal. Very interesting that you can't hear much difference at home though, I need to listen back properly loud through a good PA. I've got the FR800 that I monitored with, my PJB headphones and my Microlab Solo 9C computer speakers. Both the headphones and the speakers are really nice, but they make no pretensions at being studio-grade monitoring. I wonder if better speakers or using hem live like you suggest might show more differences.

Act one: Me sitting on the sofa the other day, lights on, music playing, lots going on that's very visible through the large front window. Act two: DPD van pulls up, I stand up to walk to the front door (what, 10 seconds?) and I get there to him pushing a 'sorry we missed you' card through the letter box. Act three: I open the door and he says 'sorry mate I knocked and rang the bell, been here ages'. I pointed to the camera above the doorbell, he practically ran back to his van to fish my parcel out without saying a word. He must have practically written the card out beforehand, as he hadn't even bothered to get my box out of the back of the van.

Hi everyone, I'm about to spend ~£335 on a Fender Rumble 2x10" cab (the black one to match the 800). To be honest, I can wait though. Do online retailers really do sales? Is it a good idea to wait until after Christmas? Thanks, Jack

Differences. LBP is blue, Millenium is pink. The LBP has a little more going on in the super lows. Exactly the kind of stuff that you'd normally want to filter out! Do I feel stupid for spending more than an order of magnitude more on one DI than the other? Yes and no. Obviously this test is very superficial in many ways. It doesn't test build quality, reliability, interference rejection, input before clipping, ability to drive long cable runs, how well the ground lift works, how they sound with just a passive bass and no buffer and other high-impedance sources or plenty of other things that you might actually need. There may be more noticeable differences working with hotter signals, dodgy electrics or a boatload of stage wireless units and wifi signals. Of course, there may not... The other thing to bear in mind is that this is one cheap and one expensive DI. Would there be more noticeable differences if I had, say a Behringer DI400 and a Telefunken? Lastly, Thomann own-brand products are known for punching well above their price point and being awesome generally, so maybe a different cheap DI would have been more appropriate.

I did a quick recording shootout.

No matter what I do I an't delete that last rig photo at the end. Oh well, enjoy the picture twice.

Hi everybody, Talking about passive DI boxes in this thread, we were wondering if there was any noticeable difference in sound between cheap and expensive passive DI boxes. Obviously, with active boxes there are big differences, especially with those that aim to purposefully colour the sound, but what about passive boxes that are just transformers in boxes? Radial (and everybody else) make big shakes about how Jensen transformers are amazing, and how important it is to have a decent transformer, especially for bass. Now, I like DI boxes, I have a lot. Chiefly for the purposes of this though, I have both a cheap and an expensive passive DI. Specifically I own several Millenium DI-Es, that currently cost the princely sum of £8.19. I also have what may be the only LBP Inc passive DI in the country (at least the maker tells me he's never sold to the UK before), which after taxes, shipping and such will cost around £150. These boxes are made by a one-man company in the states using the finest materials including a Jensen JT-DB-E, so it's basically a hand-made Radial JDI. In other words, you're unlikely to find either a 'worse' or a 'better' passive DI box. Testing methodology was thus: Sprained wrist > Fender USA P-Bass (DiMarzio Will Power pickup, quite dead D'Addario EXL170BT 45-107 strings) > Brightonion Router (providing a buffered output to both DI boxes) > DI boxes > Behringer XR18 > Ardour. I even went to a special effort to keep the cables identical brands and lengths. I used a pick a lot with rounds aiming for a trebley sound thinking that that might show up more differences, but there's some more mellow stuff too. There are 4 sections: open strings - pick/tone full on riff - pick/tone full on riff - fingers/tone 75% riff - fingers/tone off I'll apologize for my playing now, I fell over on the ice yesterday (I'd only popped out to get more wine, turns out that whilst I wasn't too drunk to drive I was in fact too drunk to walk) and I've really done a number on my left arm and wrist! So, how do they sound? Well, in the thread that started all of this, BigRedX said you'd be unlikely to hear any difference in a band mix and I thought that might be the case, but I assumed there'd be some noticeable differences in a recording. Ermmmm, nope. Not really. Not to my ears at least. I mean, if you open the files in a DAW you can see differences in the spectograph, but I can't really hear anything dramatic. To my ears, there's a little more distortion on some of the Millenium notes and it perhaps sounds a tiny bit darker and bassier overall, but there's less than 1% in it and I wonder how much of even that is psychosomatic. Having said that I'm only listening at home volumes at the moment, I'd be keen to fire up the recordings through a loud PA system. LBP Inc DI.wav Millenium DI-E.wav

That's a good question. I have a cheap Thomann DI an a very expensive LBP DI here, I wonder if there'd be any noticeable differences. Not many DI boxes will take Boss-Style power supplies, so watch out. The preamp style ones (like the Sansamps) and the guitar specific ones (like the Mooer) will though. If you have some sort of a buffer on your board then you'd be fine with a passive DI anyway.

D'oh. I'd have had a pair of the 1x10s, but there's only one left.

I bought and then sold one on the marketplace here. Lovely bass, really enjoyed how different it was. Sounded great. In the end it only went because there's other basses to try and only so much space to store them.

In the same vein as Stewblack, I've recently being toying with one of these. If you're happy with your foh tone and you don't need the eq section of an actual amp then a wedge would be the way to go IME.

Especially considering the way that the Line 6 Spider and the Yamaha (who own Line 6) THR amps integrate with the wireless bugs so easily.

That was less than £300? Stunning work, sir.

Well, now we've fallen out. I hadn't seen that before. 🤑

Why those heads with those cabinets? Thy not the Eich with the 210? Or the other way around. Both heads are very modern and very full and clear sounding. So is the super compact. Not quite as much as as something like the Big Baby, but it still tends towards uncoloured and full range. The 2x10 that Barefaced do (or any of their 10" cabs) have a much more coloured, old fashioned sound. There's probably not much to chose between the heads and it'll come out pretty equal (Eich is more powerful I guess) but the cabs are pretty far apart. Depends on what you want to sound like I suppose.