Radial J48 Direct Box
(Cost me – £85 from eBay – Bargain!)
Pros – Sounds awesome, really transparent with lots of headroom. Phantom powered so no battery wastage or awkward power supplies. Built like a tank. Simple durable buttons and switches. Toggle the thru to act as a right input so you can go in stereo. The boost in sound quality and volume is like having a pre-amp as well as a DI box.
Cons – Ummmm. Expensive but worth every penny if you want a good sound. Why would you spend hundreds or thousands on a guitar/bass and then run it through a £30 direct box?
I’ve compared 4 different ways of putting my acoustic guitar into my mixing desk:
– Straight in with Jack to Jack guitar lead. Quiet, unbalanced signal. Needs the gain turning up to get suitable volume, therefore creating more noise. No way of preventing ground hum. No way of splitting the signal to a monitor.
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– Stereo Jack to XLR. Recommended by Taylor for their expression system. This produced a much louder output. The sound was quite brittle (for want of a better description.) Simple method. No way of preventing ground hum. No way of splitting the signal to a monitor.
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– Cheap estudio DI box from Dawsons. This worked better than the previous two methods. Nice strong signal with the ability to trim some of the input gain with a louder instrument. Ground lift seemed to have some effect.
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– Radial J48 active DI box. Sounded really good and very strong signal, so much so I actually used the trim button to reduce the output to the desk slightly as it was reaching the top end of the gain on my desk. Ground lift eliminates ground hum. There is an option to reverse polarity. There is even a high pass filter/low cut filter so you can eliminate lower frequencies that often aren’t needed on an acoustic guitar in live situations.
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The best sound with the most versatility definitely came from the Radial J48 which I suppose in unsurprising considering it is the most expensive option by a fair way. I am going to use this little box at every gig and even recording I do from now on.