What?My personal experience has been that the active DI's are generally much nicer to deal with. For acoustic instruments (e.g. guitars), it's hands down in favor of the active DI. Something like a keyboard/drum might be not as dramatic.
My experience has been with both recording and live sound.
Even a $75 active Behringer will be better than a $100 passive whatever.
My guess is that the active electronics allow the DI to do things that a simple passive transformer can't do on it's own. The "things" I refer to would be give you better sound quality across all frequencies, volumes, etc.
The one thing I hate about a lot of DI's is that they are sort of black boxes - many only have inputs/outputs and no knobs to play with... and that sucks in my book If you spend extra money on something, it should have more knobs and shit on it.
Lights are cool also.
it depends what kind of instrument... say you're using an active instrument (a bass or a guitar with active electronics-the kind you need a 9v battery for) then you'd use a passive DI, and if you're using an instrument w/ active electronics then you need a passive DI. GB - kRiS
I used to do active but I switched to passive and I prefer it overwhelmingly. I set the transformer ratio very high to keep the pickups unloaded, and it sounds great, good response with that extra trafo mojo.
You really can't beat passive headroom easily or cheaply; a passive box should be able to do +22dBu (or more) without trouble, whereas a phantom-powered or battery-powered box would struggle at that level, unless it padded the input which is generally not what you want to do. The Behri is spec'ed at +10dBu input without the pad. With the -20dB pad, it would have -90dBu noise, compared with a passive -20dB transformer feeding a -125dBu mic preamp, that's -105dBu equivalent noise, or 15dB better headroom (ignoring added noise in the trafo, which should be small).
Not to diss anyone. But we get soooo hung up on specs/numbers/settings around here that we forget that we're here to make music.
And you can't make music with an unmatched impedance.
..
Even a $75 active Behringer will be better than a $100 passive whatever.,.
Whoa... you made me back away from the keyboard before lightning hit it...
I have both active and passive boxes and prefer the active, probably having to do with how close the incoming signal is to a line level signal. But I also have a handful of Behringer active boxes / splitters - and they are quirky. Sometimes phantom power injects noise, sometimes not. My Carvin passive box has one advantage in that it is generally stone quiet.
But hey - more wrenches in the toolbox as far as I can see. They've bailed my butt out a few times. I'd love to get some Radial boxes.
I have a Baggs active DI. Acoustic guitars sound great through it. Basses make it distort.
I use the L.R. Baggs Pre-amp/DI at church. If it's the same one I have, it really is top of the line sound quality.
If your bass is making it distort, you could turn down the gain some.
What is the difference? Which one should I go with? The passive seems to be cheaper. So that's a plus.
Any suggestions?
-Elliot
and using Eq on an active DI is a sound engineers nightmare.I went with both an active pick-up (Baggs) and active DI (also Baggs). The active DI has eq as well as the regular DI stuff. I've never seen any passive DI that had eq capabilities.