Intro to D.I. Boxes - AudioTech

Hi, Gospel Guitarist here with an episode on direct injection boxes for the stage or for your studio. Just a quick video on what these are for. You may or may not have heard of these. They're often called a DI box and they come in many shapes and colors by many different companies. I myself have used the Art Series. I have an AV Direct and I have the Z Direct. The Z Directs are for instruments on stage and the AV Direct is for audio video equipment and computers to use with those. So first off, if you have a guitarist on stage or a keyboard or a bass, they are what we call high Z or high impedance instruments which use a normal high impedance cable which is like your phone cord used for your guitars and keyboards and things. But we need to get this signal into a line level signal that's an XLR connector so you can plug it into your stage snake or into your mixer. So how are we going to do that? We got two different levels we're working with here. So you're going to need a DI box to accomplish this. So what you would do is you would just take whatever the instrument is and you're going to go in to the input of your DI box and then on the back of the DI box you're going to have an output XLR connector. So you're just going to plug in your microphone cord on this end. So you're going to go in to the box as a high level input and you're going to come out as a low mic level input. We have to make sure all the low all of the signals going into your mixer board are low level for stage use because you're running really long lengths of cable to the stage. If you have somebody out front of house using like a 100 foot or 50 foot snake you need everything converted by using these boxes because if you run really long runs with these kind of the high impedance cables they're really subjective to noise over about 25 feet. So they're going to get a lot of noise in your system so you don't want that. A lot of DI boxes have different things on them. Most all of them I think have ground lift switches. So if you get hum you can lift the ground on them. Do not lift the ground at your wall outlets and things like that. People break the little pins off so they just have two connectors. That's just getting yourself into a dangerous situation. Never negate the ground that way. If you need to get rid of it do it on a DI box like this or something in your equipment that has a ground lift switch. Also you have a phase here where I can invert the phase of the signal which just makes negative positive positive negative so it just flips it. So if you're getting phase cancellation then you could hit that switch and it would get rid of that. And on the front we have other switches on this model and you can have filters frequency ranges that that come into effect with the boxes. They all do different things and have different switches but they're basically they're all the same. I've been happy with the ART series so far. Had them for a couple years and I haven't had any problems with them and they're only running like 30 bucks a box or so which isn't bad. So this is the instrument side. On the other side you've got for evangelistic type meetings or board meetings or anything like that where you've got computers involved. Laptops for example. You would run a laptop into this AVI box or some other audio video box that will convert the signals and you would take the sound output and plug it in here using RCA cables from like the mini eight quarter inch you know coming out of your laptop that little eighth inch plug. So you can come out that into this box and then from this box you would plug in your mic cable on the front here and run this to to your snake or to your mixer board. This model has an on-off volume control to set the level going to the board and of course it's got ground lift and some other goodies on there. But it takes in a whole bunch of connectors on the back. I can feed you know guitars into here. I can put anything I want. Even live speaker terminals are on here coming from a power amp. This thing will handle anything. It's a really nice little tool to have handy. Another quick word on these that I have to say is if you notice I have several here. These are these are all the same here and I color code them so that when I'm running these into the board I know which one is doing what. I usually use the yellow for keyboard and the blue for bass and red for guitar but you know that can be changed up. It depends on what's on stage but it's just color coding them helps me keep them separate in my mind and then I can mark them on the board in their appropriate colors with the appropriate instrument so I know where they are and what they're doing. Just kind of helpful. Even this guy's got green on it just to help me you know stay with the foe here. So anyway that's what a DI box does. So go online check it out in your music store. They really vary in prices. You can get things like radio boxes which can be several hundred dollars which is super high studio quality type boxes for for recording studios. I would never do those on a live stage but you know I don't have the budget to support that. So you know Behringer makes a couple of them that are that are really actually quite good and don't cost a whole lot of money either. And some of theirs are made specifically for guitar so even electric guitar so they sound really nice from what I understand so and I've used the silver model of theirs. So they're worth the money. Keep a supply of these. As you can see I believe that I should have a minimum of three of these and then one for any other electronic devices that might be used during the show. So that's here's less than $150 and I'm equipped to handle pretty much anything on stage. So hope that helps you understand a little bit about DI boxes. It goes in as a high impedance signal and it comes out the other end of the box as a low mic level signal for running to your mixer through your snake. Okay so that's it for this video. That's the purpose of a DI box. You use them for guitars. You use them for bass. You use them for keyboards. Some you know drum machines. Anything that you need to be running through your PA system that comes out as a high level signal you need one of these boxes to convert it. Bass amplifiers usually have one of these built into the back and acoustic amplifiers for acoustic guitar also. If you look at the back of the amps and you see one of these these little XLR connectors it's probably going to say it's a DI out on it. Okay some of them do have line outs which is just your normal you know quarter inch and it still needs converted usually at that point but most of them do have a they have a DI built right in for acoustic and bass amplifiers. So if you're running an electric guitar into a standard electric guitar amp you're going to want to put one of these in the chain there and I'll make videos on how to use these actually functionally how you do these in different videos so but that's just an introduction to what these are for. So I hope that helps you out. Go out and always have a couple of these in your arsenal. So thank you for watching and please subscribe and I'll be cranking out more videos here shortly. Thanks for watching!