...there's really no substitute for fresh strings.
On the other end of the spectrum, my main axe is a Fender Jazz with Fender 9050L flatwounds. They're going on four years of regular play, and I've seen no reason to change them yet.
...there's really no substitute for fresh strings.
But impedance is almost never just one number. It is frequency dependent. The DIs are probably pretty close to flat over out frequencies of interest, but the pickup has a large inductive component which means the impedance gets big fast as the frequency goes up. That humbuckers might be 15K resistance at DC, but the impedance at 5KHz is 125KOhms! Even a 1M input doesn't quite get us to 10:1, but...
...The input impedance is usually in parallel with the load from the pots on the guitar. You'd probably have 500K for V and T for that pickup. Without getting too far into the math, when two impedances are in parallel, the total equivalent value is never larger than the smallest. If both are the same, the value is half, and as one gets bigger than the other, the total approaches the smaller value. So 500K V and T parallels to look like 250K by itself, and you'd like your load impedance to be about 10x that in order not to make things any worse.
Now, a passive DI doesn't have much impedance of its own in either direction. What it does is "reflect" the impedance of whatever is attached to it. In practice, that means that the effective impedance is some multiple of the device at the other end. What you multiply by depends on the turn ratio. In a typical DI this factor should be around 130. So, the InZ (the load the bass sees) will 130x the impedance of the mic pre you plug it into. That will very often be like 1.5K, which comes out a little bigger than the JDI you cited, but still not big enough for my tastes. To be fair, though, I think a lot of people like these because of the way they shave off the very top edge of typical instruments. 15K is not typical by any means. 3K-8K is more realistic for most people.
That active DI is also a lot smaller than most amp inputs. Again, I guess if you're trying to use this with as little processing as possible, it'll cut the zing maybe just enough. Heck, I've gotten some really great bass sounds plugging right into a 10K line input. It was like a free speaker sim and got us that deep, rounded, country bass feel we needed. OTOH - if you run into something more like 500K or 1M, you've got all the treble your bass could possibly give you available, and you can turn that T pot down if you feel the need.
I always just plug into a buffered-bypass pedal and that into a line input, probably an amp sim, and then I'm rocking.
CoolCat said:seems 1M is in the REDDI and 3M in the Avalaon U5......the Radials much lower and many in the 400k realm. my interface instrument in impedance is 1meg.
Ive never really had a big issue with clipping or anything but its interesting Tech Spec stuff.