Radial Engineering has added the StageBug SB-2 Passive to its line of compact DI boxes, offering an extremely portable means of feeding electric bass, acoustic guitar and keyboards into a recording or PA system.

‘We have noticed a trend whereby musicians are looking for ways to reduce the size of their payload when traveling from gig to gig,’ says Radial’s Mark Gummer. ‘This is happening both regionally when travelling on a tour bus and when traveling by air. In both cases, the attempt to downsize results in lower fuel costs, lower baggage handling costs and ultimately the reduction in size improves efficiencies all around. But as always, musicians want it all. They want smaller, but do not want to compromise on quality.’

Measuring less than 2-inch wide and 3.5-inch deep, the StageBug SB-2 has with a quarter-inch instrument input and ‘thruput’ to feed an amplifier. This connects to the custom Eclipse ET-DB3 transformer, which provides impedance matching and signal balancing. When using extra high output instruments, a -15dB pad can be inserted into the signal path – this enables the SB-2 to be used with active basses and digital pianos. A built-in auto-summing function enables stereo keyboards to be mixed mono in order to simplify setups and save channels on a mixing desk by connecting to the two quarter-inch jacks.

The StageBug SB-2 balanced output features an XLR wired to AES standard (Pin-2 hot) that enables it to drive cables 100m without noise.