ART ZDirect Professional Passive Direct Box

These things are amazing at cleaning up unbalanced line noise. Sounds awesome now! Thanks!

Took a little messing with but eliminated the buzzing sound from my guitar when recording.

These DI boxes are great, well built and feel very solid. The dual pad buttons are great, and the ground lift and phase switch buttons are solid and work as expected. The only problem that I’ve noticed is that the jacks and internals are all connected to a single PCB. After about 2 years of use, it seems the XLR and 1/4 jacks are becoming loose and the signal cuts in and out when the cables are disturbed. Definitely not ideal. Trying to get a warranty replacement from the manufacturer but haven’t heard anything back yet. This would probably not be an issue if the connectors were standard panel mount connectors like most DI boxes and not soldered onto a circuit board.

I know what ground loops are, I've encountered them in the past, I could not figure out why I could not beat this one. I asked around but no one could offer a solution, including the techs at Sweetwater. I tried other DI boxes, also didn't work, one of which was from Art themselves, and more than twice the price of this one. After much screwing around and pulled hair I learned (from an awesome guy at the sonar forums, thanks Jim!) what I needed was simply a ground lift. A way to break the sharing of a two grounds with different potential. This box has a ground lift! I can't see why others do not... possibly liability? I don't really know, but there IS a shock hazard if you lift the ground and have issues with one or both grounds. But I knew that my grounds were all safe and proper, just not common. What's better is this is a passive box. No power needed. I like that a lot, with around 30 outlets filled in my little home studio it's definitely a nice feature.

This box doesn't roll off the low end under 20hz like some do, so that's good.. I also didn't measure any additional distortion. However, my subs lost nearly 20dB of output with this box attached so I had to raise the level in the amp and my receiver to make that up. This 20dB loss was without using the 20dB attenuation buttons. It also didn't eliminate the hum I was experiencing, even with the ground lift turned on. All it did was reduce the signal by so much that the hum was not as noticeable... until you turn the gain up compensate. What did help in my case was running a small wire from my receiver's grounding screw to a screw on the sub amplifier and setting a low-pass filter for 300hz in the amp.

I am a worship pastor and have been buying this brand of DI/Direct Boxes for all my instruments for years. Great price and they work better than any others I’ve used!

It does exactly what it claims. No surprise hums or noises, nice increments of attenuation. Very well thought out. Intuitively obvious. Not rocket science. Out-performs all of the active direct boxes I've tried. They make a two channel one, but I've found it more useful to have two single channel units that can be connected in separate locations, Example: at the speakers on the stands instead of the PA mains jacks to supply an audio feed to a videographer and/or a webcaster who might be recording or casting your event.

I use these to send guitar amp signals from my sound stage back to them control room main mixer. I have hot plates between the power heads of my Marshall amps and the speaker boxes. The hot plates absorb as much power as I desire so you don't blast the place out. They also provide a line out signal. I put this signal through the direct box so I can 1) send a balanced signal through the snake to insure it is noise free 2) to prevent ground loop noise. I can't stand to hear a hum or hiss when no one is playing.