Tingly said:
I agree with jabberwock777. I rarely hear a satisfactorily recorded bass line, even in some of the most "professional" and high level recordings. There seems to be a combination of technical and cultural reasons, from the inability of most speakers to reproduce the proper vibrations, to a simple industry bias in favor of melody.
I'm very sorry to hear that you don't hear satisfactorily recorded bass lines very often in the studio, and I didn't mean to give the impression that recorded basses tend to sound bad, just different than they sound in the room, due to factors too numerous to list, and often the difference is imperceptable to 99% of the listening public, or the bass player just hasn't heard their bass that closely isolated before.
For the record, one of my bands is mixing down it's 5th studio release, and we just decided to toss all the mic'd bass tracks in favor of the DI alone. The extended midrange response (500hz-2khz) response I like from my bass cab was stomping all over the mix. The DI signal alone was much clearer and sits in the mix better. Although it's not quite what I would like for a bass tone, it moves air when turned up, and compliments the band better than my "ideal" tone.
For the record, we went Direct with a prototype SansAmp Bass DI (yup, the prototype from Tech 21 itself that later became the BDDI) into a Groove Tubes ViPre, into an LA-2A, into Pro Tools. The mic'd track was recorded using a Neumann M149 and an EV PL-20.
DI is not evil, just another option, and one that I would highly recommend printing to tape (or hard drive) no matter what else is going on. At the very least you'll be able to reamp it later. To be blunt, part of the reason a lot of bassists complain about a DI sound is that their own instrument doesn't cut it tonewise, IME--an amp is required to bring out its character. If this is you, I'd recommend that you just EQ it after the fact, find an active EQ to work with, or run a line out from your bass amp, whatever it takes, and record a direct signal somehow along with the mic'd track.
When I first started playing bass, I insisted that a studio always mic me, and it created hassles for the engineer and often resulted in a sound that was difficult to work with and limited in dynamic and frequency range. The bass tone sounded awful direct, but that was because I had my SR400's tone set to drive my amp, not sound good by itself. Expiriment when in the studio, and you'll start to isolate what works for you from what doesn't. The key, in my mind, is not to get hung up on one technique over the other, and always be open to change your habits to better suit a given project.
As always, just my opinion and experience. It just looks like some people were starting to gang up on engineers and DI's, and since I am frequently an engineer using DI's myself, I kind of took umbrage to that.
After all this, you ARE going to post clips, right, spectorbass83?
well it does not sound like I want it to, so it will probably need to be re-done. 
They ARE lazy mofos!!
