BBE DI-10 Active Direct Box

This is an active direct box I bought new in about 1996. Its most notable feature to me at the time was that it had "speaker thru" jacks (1/4" phone) so that it could be placed between an amp and its speakers--at the time, I wanted to send a post-power-stage direct signal to the P.A. from a small Valco tube guitar amp, skipping the mic but getting a cool power-stage crunch into the system. The DI-10 also has a filtering circuit to emulate a miked speaker; if I recall it rolls off frequencies below 100Hz and above 4KHz, as well as attenuating fourth-order harmonics or something.
It's easy to use. There's not much to do wrong--put a battery in it (or hook it to an XLR cable with phantom power) and decide what sort of signal you want to DI and plug that signal into the appropriate jack. The jacks, by the way, are as follows: in front, it has a 9V input for an AC adapter, the in/out switch for the speaker emulation function, and a 1/4" phone line out. In back, there are input and thru 1/4" phone jacks for patching the unit in between an amp and speakers, a 1/4" phone line in, and a balanced XLR out.
To access the battery, you remove four small phillips screws and lift the top and sides of the housing off--the battery is held in a clip inside. The unit will choose the strongest of battery, AC adapter or phantom power and run off that, if all three are available to it, so that's comforting if the battery runs out. I've put maybe two or three batteries in it in six years; they last forever.
The stick-on rubber feet come off sometimes, but similar ones are available at home depot.

I didn't end up using it the way I planned when I bought it. It worked well for sending my little tube amp's sound to the P.A., but about then I changed bands, and we played more in little neighborhood bars where a)the P.A. was only used for vocals and b)my amps were loud enough. By accident, I discovered that this thing placed after my ProCo Rat II pedal changed that unit from a special effect to a killer front end for my rig. No kidding.
If I'd run from the Rat's output into the DI-10's line in, switch the speaker emulation on, and from the DI-10's line out into my amp, the sound just smoked. The Rat fizz was gone, and in its place was a textured, girthy crunch. At low gain settings on the Rat, I could leave it on all the time and use my guitar's volume to control the clean/dirty situation. For solos, a preamp pedal before the Rat would do the trick.
As far as I'm concerned, BBE and ProCo need to get together. The DI-10 should be part of the Rat circuit, perhaps also available for the rackmount crowd.
Anyway, it's not noisy, batteries last forever, it works fine with or without emulation, although for my purposes the emulation is almost always on, and nothing about it is really bad. I've DI'ed several distortion pedals straight into protools for overdubs, and it always works fine. It can work as an input buffer for acoustics in a pinch, and it seems to work fine for basses too. And if you want to send the sounds of your power tubes into the board, it will sure do that. I've never tried the Hughes and Kettner Red Box or any of the others, but I would think they'd work for this too. Their speaker emulation probably has a different flavor, so that would be subjective.
The things I've raved about here aren't about being "pristine," so I'll give it a 9...It's a great tool to have.

The only reason I'd hesitate to depend on it was if I knew the rubber feet police would show up at the gig, and kick me off stage for having a DI with only three feet on it. Buy a pack of spares at Home Depot and keep a small phillips screwdriver and a 9V with you (in case you DON'T have access to AC or phantom power). Other than that, it's great. In my view, the feet thing is minor. You should have spare batteries and a scewdriver with you anyway.

Never had to deal with them.

I was using this in sort of an alt-country band, and used a pretty distorted sound that I cleaned up by playing softer and rolling back my volume. This thing made a Rat pedal into an always-on part of my signal chain; the added warmth and mid detail the DI-10 added sounded great through my little tube amps, but it sounded pretty good through solid-state practice amps too. It was like a key I stumbled on that unlocked a gear combination I'd never have thought of deliberately, but served me well for several years. These days I'm between electric and use it to run direct when recording distorted tracks into computers. I'd miss it if I lost it, and would try to find another--I think it's been discontinued. I bet the Red Box is still available, so maybe I'd try that too. What I wish it had was a way to put it and the Rat into one housing, and maybe screw-on feet. Other than that,
it's a great unit. It's kind of a swiss army knife for guitar dorks.