Countryman DI - Type 85 Direct Box

Countryman DI

Spectacular. This direct box is the one to use.   Super durable is its middle name.   Made strong - you can run it over with a pick up truck, throw it at your ex-girlfriend's civic, and feel confident to rock out at the local bar that same night.   Not only does it handle anything you put it through, it sounds better then any other DI in its price range.

The Countryman DI is an active direct box, with a super clean and really hot signal.   It uses phantom power or a 9V battery.   There is a ground drop switch to take care of those pesky electrical problems that always seem to come up in the most inconvenient of times.   There is the standard ¼ inch "line-in" jack and two connections out - an instrument level ¼ inch out and a line level XLR out.   A typical use for the Countryman would be on the bass guitar, where the bassist would plug into the DI, send a ¼ inch cable out of the DI into his amp, and send an XLR cable out of the DI into a front of house mixer or recording device.

I've used the Countryman DI plenty of times on the bass guitar, and it always sounds great.   It provides a tight and full of oomph sound - as long as the bass and bass player sound good.   But that goes for anything. If the player sounds like crap, then they're going to sound like crap on the recording.

Live sound?   The Countryman DI is a staple.   Perfect for keyboards and bass guitars.

Another good use for this DI would be to record a clean electric guitar track into a digital recording interface, and add effects after the fact.   Things like distortion and flanger can be added afterwards by means of plug-ins and the like.

Some problems with this DI - Lots of recording engineers swear by passive DI's, rather than active DI's, because there is one less thing to go wrong in the long list of things to go wrong.   Passive DI's need no power, where as, active DI's do.   But of course, these same engineers all seem to love their condenser microphones, which all need power.   So, I cross this off and say that active vs. passive is negligible.

            Many people like to cut guitar tracks through a DI, then re-amp the sound later on.   Having a passive DI can save you the hassle of buying a re-amping box, and can be done by reversing the signal through a passive DI with a couple of adapters, then send it into an amplifier and speaker, where you would then have a microphone set up to record the new sound.

            Personally, the reasons for choosing against the Countryman are no good.   How often do I re-amp a guitar, and do I want a worse sound for fear that my phantom power wont work?   This is a superb DI, for a reasonable price, that can easily compete sonically with thousand-dollar fancy with lots of cool knobs to turn, DI's.

            The only real problem I've had with this DI, and it wasn't the DI's fault, was when I recorded a bassist who plays slap bass.   In most cases, I'd simply turn down the gain until the bass fit, and if the bassist slaps for parts of the song and plays normal for others, I will just ask them to play the song in two passes.   One pass, the slapping parts. The other pass, in the normal style.   In one instance, this still didn't work.   The bassist had such a loud signal coming out of his bass when he slapped that I couldn't get his signal low enough with out sounding lame.   So, I did what should have been done for this bassist anyways.   I pointed a microphone at his speaker cabinet and I captured his amplified sound. - Adam