Hi. I am NDJ of Art MIDI! In this video, I will introduce a new DI box series called River from a Palmer, and compare it with the famous DI brand, Radial product. Everyone knows that there is a big difference between a mic preamp on an audio interface and an external mic preamp. However, few people know that there is a big difference between recording an instrument through the Hi-Z port of an audio interface and the sound of an instrument recorded through a direct box. It has quite a bit different than you might think. In the past, I was not very interested in DI box, but when I first used Radial products, I was surprised and became a Radial collector. I have quite a lot of Radial. I have Radial J48, Radial isolator J-ISO, Trim-Two, JS2, as well as a bunch of Radial guitar effects. But this time, I heard that a new DI box series came out from Palmer, so I tested it. In order to test properly, I visited the studio of guitarist Hee-Doo Lee, who tested the Warm Audio Centavo effector the other day. On this day, guitarist superstar Professor Noh Kyung-hwan also came to play. He's a really cool and funny guy. Professor Kyunghwan Noh wanted to test Centavo once, so I met him, and he really liked it. So, he highly appreciated the Centavo and borrowed it. And I proceeded DI test with guitarist Hee-Doo Lee. First of all, the design of the two products is very neat. Both designs are really solid. Both are products of hard steel. If it's plastic, it might break, but I don't think you need to worry about breaking them at the concert hall. They're very sturdy. The test was done with an acoustic guitar with the pickup. Then, before starting the comparison, I would like to say one thing that Palmer products are passive DIs and Radials are active DIs. I wanted to borrow the Radial Passive DI JDI, but I couldn't borrow it, so I tested it with the J48 product I had. There is a difference between passive and active levels. Therefore, the gain value naturally differed. It's like the significant difference output level between the active pickup and the passive pickup. Same differences. However, there is no such thing as active DI sounds better and passive DI sounds better. Same goes for pickups. And the price difference is quite large. The Palmer Wipper is also cheaper. Another difference is the frequency response difference. Radial is 20hz to 20khz and Palmer Wipper is 10hz to 60khz. 60khz is really huge high frequency. First, guitarist Lee Hee-doo compared arpeggio guitar phrases and stroke guitar phrases. And I personally tested the sound of a bass, a synth bass, and a pad-type synthesizer in my studio. You can listen to all the recorded sounds in order. For the signal flow for recording, I received sound from the instrument to the DI box, the DI box to the mic pre, and the RME Fireface AD converter. I'm going to give you sound samples from now on, but the sound quality may have deteriorated a little since it was uploaded to YouTube. And if you use cheap computer speakers or earphones or headphones, the difference may not be noticeable, and if you use reference monitor headphones or monitor earphones or monitor speakers, you will feel the difference. Let's listen to the acoustic guitar sound first. First of all, when I first tested the noise level, both are great. Both are products you can trust and use. Regarding the guitar sound, what I and guitarist Lee Hee-doo talked about was that our opinions were completely the same. Palmer was very candid and sounded the closest to the real sound. Especially in the case of guitar, harmonics in the high-frequency range are very important, and the harmonics were expressed really well. On the other hand, Radial makes the sound a bit fat. I think it's probably a characteristic of the Jensen transformers that go into Radial. I like the fattening sound of Jensen transformers, so I have a full collection of Radial DI boxes, but in the case of guitars, Palmer is definitely better for me. The Palmer sound is very sharp, so the guitar sound is very realistic and very well implemented. It seems much more natural. Then listen to the bass and synth sounds I tested separately. And the guitar, the bass, the synth, the recording source was the same, and there was no seasoning at all. Certainly Radial makes the bass tighter and fatter with the lower midrange. The same goes for the synth bass. The sound gets thicker. However, in the case of an atmosphere-type pad with a lot of spatial effectors, it seems that the reverb comes in wider and contains the reverb reverb for a long time because the hair loss is definitely high. By the way, I think Palmer's new river series is really good. It's really clean and delivers the original sound well. Those who like FAT and a warmer, solid sound may choose Radial, and those who like clean, honest, and natural sound may go for Palmer. I'm trying to buy a Palmer because of the guitar. Really personally, I think Palmer suits the guitar better. I don't know if you can rent and test, but please try it. Then, of course, the sound quality has deteriorated on YouTube itself, but I hope it will help you roughly to compare each DI box character with the sound sample I uploaded, and I will fade out for another test. thank you for watching!
