Instrument input in the Firewire Solo

[Another Guitar Dude]

Hi all,

I have an old Firewire Solo that I've been using mainly for pre-demos and youtube videos, however, in a few weeks I'm tracking DI guitars for an EP and I would like to achieve the best quality possible in such DIs. I read some days ago that the Hi-Z input (instrument input) in the Firewire Solo is not very good and some people recommend the use of DI boxes using the mic input instead. Do you think a DI box is worth buying? Would it make a big difference in the quality of the DIs?

Thanks for your help.

 

[Pickasso]

I would say find a manual for your interface, and look up the input impedance measurement for the Hi-z input. If the input impedance is low, then yeah, you'd notice a huge difference using a di box, 1 Mohm or higher impedance is ideal for guitar. It's like taking off constraints choking the tone.

If your interface's impedance is already 1 Mohm, the difference will be slight, how's the tone right now?

 

[Another Guitar Dude]

Thanks for your reply Pickasso. I checked the specs and the impedance of the instrument input is 270 kOhms. It's quite low, isn't it ? I think I'll start looking at some DI boxes then. Or maybe would you recommend to invest in a new interface instead?

As I said, I never noticed that the tone was bad with the Firewire Solo for the stuff I was doing (recording pre-demos and youtube videos). However, now I'm more serious into mixing and I have this EP recording coming soon so I would like to have the best tone I could get.