Many have sung the praise of the SansAmp Bass Driver and I picked one up several years ago. I was fairly disapointed at first as it seemed to me to have an overly processesed and almost "phased" sound that was none to warm.
Then I bought
an ART TubePac and ran the SansAmp into it and got very warm sweet bass mmmmm. I don't have much to compare it with though and I am still stuck in budget four track cassette land so take that in consideration concerning my review but I have recorded in four local pro and semi-pro studio's in Oklahoma City and never got anything that sounded as good as the SansAmp and TubePac combo.
RE: active and passive into the SansAmp Bass DI it and all DI boxes I know of will work equally well with the SansAmp.
Many bass amps have seperate inputs for active and passive basses that may include seperate signal paths (or just a pad) to better match the lower impedance and higher gain of an active bass and to decrease distortion/overload.
These came out
way before the current crop of modelers and amp simulators (ie POD, V-Amp, Line 6 etc) and in comparison it offers little in variety of tones from the same bass but it can be usefull. Personally I am a happy man live with one very good warm basic tone and look to technique and minimal effects for adding variety to my parts. I also enjoy achieving more of a live feel in my recordings than your more esoteric studio production sounds right now so I am not looking for a huge amount of tonal options in by bass tone if you know what I mean.
If you want alot of variety of tonal options with one DI box and one bass this would not be your ticket. If you just want a simple but usefull and fairly inexpensive DI box for bass this may do it for you and it can run off battery (9v), walwart or phantom power, has a seperate bypass output jack and ground lift. It is also dependable and is usefull for live and studio work.
