Radial celebrates 30 years: a brand everywhere on stages

Key takeaways

• Radial was born in 1996 in Vancouver, founded by Peter Janis, with one initial obsession: the direct box
• The JDI, a passive DI with a Jensen transformer, requires no power and electrically isolates the source from the console
• Reamping lets you replay a dry take through a real amp, days after the guitarist has left
• For its 30th anniversary, the brand releases the TTYM30 and stays true to its course: True to your music

There’s a pretty paradoxical thing in the pro audio world: the better a piece of gear does its job, the less people talk about it. On a big stage, everyone looks at the guitar, the amp, the mics or the console. And between all that, there are lots of little boxes whose only job is to get the right signal to the right place, without noise, without loss, and above all every night. In this field, there’s one name you come across absolutely everywhere for 30 years: Radial.

So today, exceptionally, I’m not going to test a product for you. I’m going to tell you a story, that of a Canadian brand that built its reputation on objects the audience will never hear.

1996: Radial is born in Vancouver and tackles DIs

At the origin of Radial is Peter Janis, musician and entrepreneur, who founded the brand in Vancouver, Canada. A little coincidence that makes me smile: it’s also my birth year. And the very first problem the team decided to tackle is disarmingly simple: the DI.

A DI, or direct box, is used to take the signal from a bass, an acoustic guitar or a keyboard and send it cleanly to a console. Its job boils down to three points, and these three points make all the difference on stage.

• Matching impedance and level between an instrument and a console input
• Balancing the signal so it can travel long cables without picking up interference
• Electrically isolating the source from the console, which solves the famous ground loops

The brand’s answer is the JDI. An extremely robust passive DI equipped with a Jensen transformer. It needs no power, and the transformer ensures this isolation between the source and the console. The idea is very simple: not to embellish the signal, just to respect it.

This is the box that established Radial’s reputation among sound engineers, and it hasn’t changed a bit since. You plug your bass or electro-acoustic in jack, you go out in XLR to the console, and a thru output lets you keep feeding your stage amp.

At the heart of the box, the Jensen transformer and a Mu-Metal shielded chassis against electromagnetic interference. And there’s even a Speaker mode, with the corresponding attenuation, to capture the character of an amp in parallel with a speaker.

Passive DI or active DI: two answers for two situations

Over the years, needs evolve and so do the products. Alongside the passive JDI, you find active solutions like the J48 Stereo, which handles two channels in one box and draws phantom power 48 V from the console to power its circuit.

And I want to be very clear about this, because it’s the question that comes up most often: it’s not the JDI but better. They are two approaches for two situations. The passive handles instruments with high output levels without asking anyone for anything. The active gives you dynamic headroom and a high-impedance input, which works very well for keyboards and instruments with onboard electronics.

This one is the box for the keyboard player and multi-instrumentalist. Two jack inputs, two balanced XLR outputs, two Thru outputs to feed amps or monitors, and a Merge switch that sums stereo to mono when the stage demands it.

It draws all it can from the console’s 48 V to keep dynamic headroom, and on the front you find the phase reverse, ground switch and an 80 Hz high-pass filter that cleans stage resonances in two seconds.

Reamping, or how to choose the amp three days after the guitarist

There’s another practice Radial is intimately linked to, and that has become a reflex in the studio: reamping. The principle is brilliantly simple. You record a guitar keeping its direct and clean signal, what we call a “dry” take. Then, later, you send that same performance back through a real amp to choose your sound with a clear head.

Basically, the guitarist could have been home for three days and you’re still testing amps, moving a mic by two centimeters and swapping a pedal. It’s the sound engineer’s dream, and honestly the guitarist’s too: no need to call back because the sound no longer fits the mix.

The Pro-RMP adapts the line output of your audio interface to get a signal suitable for a guitar amp’s instrument input. You plug in via XLR, output via jack, and an output level control lets you precisely dial in the volume sent to the amp. That’s where you adjust the preamp’s attack, and it changes everything on a distorted sound.

It’s 100% passive, with a transformer that isolates the gear from each other, and a ground lift switch to quiet hum as soon as you mix interface, amp and studio power. And it’s not just for guitar: it also works great for sending a synth, percussion or even a voice through an external effects chain.

If you prefer a fully passive approach built around a Jensen transformer, there’s also the Reamp JCR, the in-house studio reamper. And this story has a key date: in 2011, Radial acquired the Reamp technology developed by producer and engineer John Cuniberti. Once again, the principle is very Radial: take a potentially complicated workflow and make it clean, simple and repeatable.

Routing, splitting, transporting: Radial on stage

Because having a good sound isn’t enough. You also need to be able to route it, split it, sometimes send it far away, and make sure everything works at every gig. Here, you get the company logic: a specific problem, a small metal box that solves it.

Send a guitar to two amps

The BigShot ABY lets you send a guitar to two amps, or switch between them with your foot. But using two amps at once quickly raises ground and phase issues. So you get isolation and polarity inversion functions to handle this kind of setup cleanly. Splitting a guitar isn’t just putting a Y at the end of a cable.

Cross a big stage without losing the signal

Another classic situation: transporting an instrument signal over a long distance, when your pedalboard is stage left and your amp is at the back of the stage. That’s the role of the SGI Stereo, with a system that adapts the signal for transport before restoring it at the destination, here on two channels. On a large stage where pedals and amps are far apart, this kind of solution really makes sense.

Talk to the crew without the audience hearing

And sometimes, the needs are even more specific. The HotShot MD lets a musician communicate with techs or other musicians without sending it to the front of house. You press the footswitch to talk to the crew, release it, and you’re immediately back to normal. Said like that, it’s not spectacular, but on tour it saves you from managing separate front of house and talkback mics: just one mic, switchable.

Voco-Loco: what if the singer got pedals?

There’s also a moment when the brand opened the door to more unusual gear. The Voco-Loco is one of them: it lets you integrate guitar effect pedals into a chain intended for a mic source, creating a loop adapted to level and impedance differences. Basically, Radial looks at a pedalboard and thinks: why should guitarists be the only ones having fun?

You plug in a mic via XLR, output via XLR to the console, and between the two you insert your delays, reverbs, overdrives and modulations on 6.35 mm jack. The class A FET mic preamp provides gain, and a 2-band EQ lets you shape the signal before the effects.

The loop is transformer isolated, with separate send and return levels, and a tone control on the reinjection when a pedal is a bit too bright. The blend knob doses dry/wet by hand. Singers, beatboxers, harmonica players, saxophonists, trumpeters: the playground is wide.

30 years later, Radial is on every stage

With this philosophy, the brand ended up everywhere. We're talking about gear used by you and your band in a neighborhood venue or a SMAC, but also on the tours of Toto, the Stones, Sting, AC/DC or Metallica, and more recently Dua Lipa or Olivia Rodrigo. The logic is pretty simple to grasp: the bigger a show gets, the more essential reliability becomes. A small buzz on a small PA becomes a huge buzz on a huge PA.

That's exactly what the brand is celebrating today with the TTYM30, its anniversary edition. True to your music, 30 years. And the idea is not just to look back: the message that goes with it talks about the future, built for the next generation of sound.

What 30 years of Radial really tell

In 30 years, studios, stages, rigs and technologies have changed a lot. But between the moment a musician creates a sound and the moment someone hears it, you still have to manage to get the cleanest possible signal through. And since 1996, Radial has simply been trying to make sure your sound arrives on the other side exactly as intended.

So happy birthday, and see you in 30 years to talk, who knows, about quantum DI. Or, knowing the brand, about a little metal box with a jack that does exactly what you ask of it. You can find the whole range on the Radial page, and the rest of the section on the direct boxes. If you have questions about a particular box, leave me a comment under the video. With that, I wish you a great day and I'll see you soon!