todneilpage

Exactly , however using the DI box will turn your signal into a low impedance , balanced , mic level signal which wont drive headphones or work well as stomp box inputs .....but hey you can always put the stomp boxes ahead of the DI box and get your headphone feed from the mixer or mix monitoring system headphone feed. Dual purposing outputs is rarely a good idea! Hey fflbrgst, I see you are a major contributor here. I'm new to the Line 6 world and would love some tips and tricks you must have gleaned from your time here. Im a touring musician with a EE background. Designed and built large format mixing consoles with Euphonix for years so don't hold back. However anything you think is cool , im sure I will too. Best, Tod My name here at gmail if u want to take it off- forum.

Good idea for getting the stereo signal out of the amp! But of course stereo effects are not possible with the amp alone since it only has one speaker....lol And since the Spider amp doesn't provide a balanced output on either (headphone) channel, balanced XLR's are not possible unless you add electronics that produce an inverted signal in addition to the normal one. I guess my real issue is the fact that the manual just indicates to plug the "direct out' signal into a mixer, failing to explain any of the stuff we are discussing here. Be well

Unfortunately, the design engineers decided to dual purpose an output without understanding the consequences. The PHONES/DIRECT OUT provides a stereo signal to the tip and the ring of a 1/4 Jack when inserted into the connector on the back panel. This is fine for listening with headphones but absolutely WORTHLESS when connecting to any mixing console input. Almost all mixer inputs accept BALANCED audio signals and when you send a STEREO signal to such an input you will only hear the audio that is not common to either channel. Mostly it will be a really crappy, low level signal that is impossible to use to anything. The easy fix is to lift one of the conductors on the cable (tip or ring) and leave it unconnected to anything. A more complex fix is to combine the leaft and right channels to make a mono signal and put it on the tip of a cable sent to the mixer and leave the ring unconnected. WHY? Because BALANCED audio format is one of the coolest tricks around. A balanced output has the guitar (audio) signal AND the inverse of the guitar (audio) signal both on the one cable. Signal on the tip (or pin 2 in XLR) and inverse of the signal on the ring (pin 3 of the XLR) . When these signals are sent to a BALANCED INPUT, the signals are SUBTRACTED from each other to produce a signal with twice the gain. This is all done to eliminate the noise which will be a positive signal on both conductors. Say the signal is 2 volts and the noise is .5 volts. You get 2 - (-2) = 4 for the signal and .5 -.5 = 0 for the noise. brilliant stuff because it is so simple. So when you plug your DIRECT OUT into a balanced input (almost all mixers have balanced inputs) you get LEFT SIGNAL - RIGHT SIGNAL = almost all the good stuff gone! I was shocked that a great company like LINE6 would pass this off and even tell you tpo use the DIRECT OUT to record. Really a remedial design issue that should have been caught before they made the amps. peace