GEAR REVIEW
RADIAL HIGHLINE AND HIGHLINE STEREO | WM Staff Writer
KEY FEATURES
• Designed to deliver your Amp sim sound to the PA with minimal coloration.
• Keeps your signal path balanced through longer cable runs.
• Uses premium Jensen transformers for optimal audio quality.
• Helps to break up unwanted ground loop noise from your signal path.
• Available in mono and stereo versions.
Designed with today’ s amp simulators in mind, the Radial Highline and Highline Stereo are passive line isolators built to deliver the true sound of your amp sim pedal to the front of house.
Let’ s take a look at where this product came from, what its purpose is, and what it’ s designed to do. Radial already makes lots of professional grade DI boxes and interface boxes, so why make a device like the Highline? The answer is Radial decided to create the Highline due to the wide popularity of amp simulator pedals that have exploded on the market over the last few years.
Today, many church guitarists serving on their worship teams rely on Amp sims like the IK Multimedia Tonex, Strymon Iridium, Universal Audio Ruby and Dream and many others. There are certain differences between these amp pedal sims and your typical guitar pedals and instruments- Amp sims are typically low impedance devices, and they usually have hotter line level outputs, and some even offer balanced outputs. A typical guitar pedal, by comparison, has a high impedance, a lower instrument level signal, and it will always be unbalanced.
Players who utilize these amp sims are looking for a solution that provides the proper signal conversion and delivers their tone cleanly to the front of house without any change in signal level. Since they already have amp sim pedals with hot outputs, they want to be able to go to the front of house with as high of a signal level as they can, and they don’ t want any other compromises in their audio signal path. The Highlines allow you to take your amp sim into the input, and then take the XLR balanced output straight to the front of house PA.
A typical DI box is going to have a 12-to-1 transformer inside it, which is going to take your instrument-level signal from your guitar and your amp sim down to mic-level, meaning it will go to the PA at a level that is optimized for connecting to your mic preamps. This usually works out well because your mic preamps are expecting that level, and you can always turn up the gain at the board if needed.
The problem with this scenario is that if you’ re already outputting line level signal from your amp sim, it’ s not necessary to reduce the signal level just to gain it back up when it hits the front of house. The Highline addresses this issue by using a premium Jensen transformer with a 1-to-1 ratio, so what you put into the Highline is exactly what you get out. Also, unlike a typical
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