Quote Originally Posted by guitardan777
A few suggestions:

To see if your pedal rig is putting out enough signal, just plug it in w/ a short guitar cable directly to the mixer (no snake, no cables over 25 ft.)
If the signal level is fine then the problem lies in the 'Line Loss' from trying to run it throught the snake / or cables longer than 25'.
If the signal level is still too low, then you'll need a device like a line driver or clean booster to get the signal up.

Impeadance matching is most important when running a long line or though a snake. Your pedals are a HiZ out. So if you want to run it through a snake w/ or w/out a DI, LoZ is the way to run to the board. You can get Hi to Lo Z adapters for both ends. Or just one to convert the pedal(s) output to LoZ and use the XLR LoZ in at the board.
I'll check out the mixer direct-input thing. Good idea.

For the impedance part, I was going through a DI box before the snake, which should drop it down to balanced LoZ, then the snake input was HiZ. I checked to make sure all other connections were similarly bridged connections (LoZ -> HiZ), and I'm pretty sure they were, so the voltage (i.e. signal) should have been preserved.

In the end, I gave up and will keep dragging my monitor in the immediate future. We're just not set up with proper monitoring capability to do ampless just yet. It would be fighting a major uphill battle at present. Still, a good chance to learn. Thanks for the ideas.