Rosie C Posted January 4 Posted January 4 Does anyone have any experience of the Radial SB-1 and SB-2 DI boxes? I have the SB-2 passive box for my bass guitar. But reading the blurb from Radial it's really for bass or keyboard. The SB-1 is the one for acoustic guitar and that's around £90. The background is ... today was my first attempt to do some recording on my new Zoom H8 recorder. Something I overlooked when choosing it is the number of jack inputs. There's only 2 XLR/jack combination sockets, the rest are XLR. Even the 4-channel expansion module only adds more XLRs. I used my SB-2 and it sounded OK. I'm wondering whether the SB-1 is going to be worth the extra expense. I'm plugging in my Goldtone guitar-bodied octave mandolin, for most purposes it's an acoustic guitar.
ezbass Posted January 4 Posted January 4 35 minutes ago, Rosie C said: I used my SB-2 and it sounded OK. I think that’s your answer. I can’t imagine one passive DI box being that much different from another (happy to be corrected here), any differences should be fixable in the eq section of the DAW. 1
randythoades Posted January 6 Posted January 6 (edited) I haven't used those particular DI boxes before but I have used others and have and use several Zoom recorders for different applications. The H8 wouldn't be my choice for multitrack recording, it is more of a compact field recorder to capture band recordings, podcasting away from your desk etc. But it will do the job fine as long as you don't need the extra functionality. If you are at your desk, just use it as an audio interface and make all the corrections and parameters in your DAW. But I don't think you will need to run the DI at all, you should be able to plug straight into the combo jack, they are meant for guitar level signals and have switchable Hi-Z. Should be no problem if you have an onboard preamp or powered pickup. If it is just a passive pickup then you are still be able to plug in if you increase the gain enough but accept that there will be additional noise. There isn't a massive amount of EQ etc in the Zooms themselves so if you don't want to export into computer then your editing options are limited (not always a bad thing!) so you want as good a signal as possible going in. My own solution is to get an old Zoom 504ii acoustic effects box off eBay for like £25 and use that to boost and modify the signal as best I can before it gets to the recorder and ignore the PC until final mastering. Edited January 6 by randythoades 1
Rosie C Posted Friday at 21:21 Author Posted Friday at 21:21 Thanks for the replies! I'll stay with the SB-2 for now. Re. the H8 - yes, we are effectively doing live band recordings in our practice space - then transferring the files to a computer for editing in the DAW. The problem with using the combo jack was we had 4 jacks to plug in and only 2 jack sockets 1
randythoades Posted Monday at 08:03 Posted Monday at 08:03 On 10/01/2025 at 21:21, Rosie C said: Thanks for the replies! I'll stay with the SB-2 for now. Re. the H8 - yes, we are effectively doing live band recordings in our practice space - then transferring the files to a computer for editing in the DAW. The problem with using the combo jack was we had 4 jacks to plug in and only 2 jack sockets Ah yes, I see. You could use a multi DI such as the Behringer Ultra DI800 as that would give 8 DI inputs and 8 balanced XLR outputs into the H8. A much cheaper option than changing your interface.
