Thanks Kronos and everyone with their experience, so good to have it in one thread.

For the record last night I was able to try a pair of active DI's versus a passive stereo DI on a hot output from a drum pad / backing track. Because this drummer A) sends the output to his own monitoring and B) must be freakin' deaf the output was *very* hot, he'd hit it hard for some samples and the level was pretty big. Even the backing track level was crazy, this unit was set for +4 and then just kept turning up after soundcheck. I wanted him to turn down and let me send more back to get that under control but it wasn't going to happen. In the first set I used the actives, just some cheap things, they were OK until he played certain samples and especially later in the set he turned up yet more. Overloaded they sounded ugly. I was able to borrow someone's new Radial ProD2 passive stereo and under those conditions it sounded *much* better. I don't know if the pads are before or after the transformer, one would hope before for exactly this purpose, it's not my DI and I didn't see a manual. But when it was receiving that much input the transformers saturating were so much nicer than the actives clipping out. Admittedly there were ways I probably could have solved it but the chance to compare the types under stress was worth taking.

EDIT Gearspace seems to think that by the passive unit I was referring to a Telefunken but that's not the case