SHELLY STEFFENS: My name is Shelly Steffens. I've been a front-of-house sound engineer for the last seven years or so. Today, I'm working at the Empty Bottle in Chicago. It's one of my favorite venues to go to see independent musical acts from all over the world.

I love working here. I've worked here since probably 2004. Tonight, I will be mixing three bands, [SOUNDS LIKE] some fellow local acts to support your local music acts.

So we have a bunch of passive DI's and one active DI here for empty bottle. The active DI that we have here is these ULTRA-DI, the DI100's. It's a Behringer product. I personally am not a fan of these DIs. They are quite affordable but I've had some -- I've had a few problems with these interacting with kind of weird -- like older electronics. For whatever reason, these don't work really well with older keyboards. I don't exactly know why that is.

We actually used to have four of these. We are down to one like it says bad, so that tells you how durable they are. I guess it's maybe just the link out is bad but the input is still good so it's still sort of working.

One good thing about these is they have 40 dB of pad on them so if you have both of these plugged in -- both of these pressed down, you have 40 dB of headroom attenuation. So that's good as far as if you have a source that is really loud like a keyboard that's really loud and it's overdriving your input, you can -- you have 40 dB of headroom to play with, so that's kind of atypical of a DI and that's a great feature.