Multi channel DI for keyboards

For just a basic small 4 ch DI you can’t beat the price of used Stewart 4 ch DI’s. They are active and can be ru off of phantom or Walwart .

Wow. That's good to know
Hmmm... It's on sale, which is part of the reason I was considering it, but I need something sooner than later.

Cheap one here. And its not even mine. 

reverb.com/au/item/66368362-radial-engineering-jd6-six-channel-rackmount-di

I guess I should have qualified my original post. There is a limit to how much I want to spend, and I'd say that limit is in the $1500 range or less. I've been aware of those Ollas, and heard nothing but good things, but that's way more than I can or want to spend on this. Eight channels of Olla would unfortunately be over double my budget.

Honestly, what I may be considering now is just getting a TRS patch bay to rack near my keyboards, and just have all of the outputs of my keyboards show up there, along with the inputs to my pair of RNDIs (which I quite like), and then just patch as needed. It certainly would be a lot cheaper and only a little more effort than having everything wired up to a multichannel DI.

I still may go the multichannel DI route though. I'm weighing options. It still would be nice though to have everything patched up and ready to go through the desired recording chain at all times, for all 6 to 8 channels. I'm kind of on a mission to have everything set up in stations in my studio, with 40 channels (or at least nearly as much of 40 channels as I can afford) set and ready to record at all times. No patching, or at least VERY little. No knob turning, or at least VERY little. Just turn things on, open the DAW, and hit record.

Yeah, RNDIs have kind of become my standard DI for everything, other than electric guitar, where I have three LL Redeyes, because they can also pull double duty as dedicated reampers. I'd still like to pick up a Zod or two eventually, for more specialty purposes, where you want a more overtly colored tone, but I don't strictly need that.

I have five RNDIs, of which I use two parked on the outputs of my Neo Ventilator coming out of the Hammond M3, two parked on keyboards, and one parked on bass. Speaking of bass, just running thru the RNDI improved the sound coming out of the bass amp, nevermind the tone of the DI signal itself. I'm guessing it's a combo of the loading that the RNDI places on the bass guitar, plus whatever tone the circuit itself is adding.

I really like the RNDI.

Ah, I forgot about this one. I'll look more into it.

There, somewhat surprisingly, are not a lot of options out there for multi channel DIs.

I recently built a few custom,1U, 8ch DI racks They are based around our OLLA DI transformer which can receive both balanced and unbalanced signals of any level. Then followed with an active gain stage which can drive a nail though concrete.

This is not a line product but I have a few boards left over if there is any interest. Here is an Instagram post with images and more details…

http://instagram.com/p/ClKLKpFvPPS

I don’t need one of these but the fact that Quint does and then Pueblo Audio happens to have a few pieces that might work out is what makes this place so cool.

I'm sure that 8 channel unit sounds fantastic, but, yep, that's a lot more $ than I can do, unfortunately. Oh well, I'm sure the person who originally commissioned these has some pretty nice DIs on their hands.

Maybe matt@IAA could build an 8 Channel di, similar to his Portia Street Stomp, for a reasonable price?

Wouldn't a summing mixer work? Lots to choose from.....

Yeah I was thinking of a setup exactly like the Phoenx N8: Input, output, thru and gain...all through some nice vibey transformers.  

For my purposes I'd need to be able to run it straight into my A/D, it defeats the purpose if I have to use additional preamps.  I'd have already hit up Matt if I had the money to spend, but alas there are too many other purchases.