If you’re even slightly handy with a soldering iron it’s pretty trivial to build a passive reamp box for under $20usd (well under depending on how you design it). I built one of these a while back and it sounds great but I’d recommend simplifying it even more. For me, the lowe output, inductorless mode that the article says bhaves more like a single coil pickup has been mostly useless and if I were going to do it again I’d eliminate that altogether, which means one less resistor and sitch. Between that and using 1/4" jacks instead of XLR the cost is really low, I think the transformer was around $8 and that’s by far th most expensive part.
Some pedals, especially older designs from the 60s and 70s, tend to sound quite a bit different depending on how they’re loaded, so something like this can make a big difference. For other pedals it hardly matters at all. No idea if it would be worth pairing it with a passive DI for the return into the OT but probably not unless you luck in to a free transformer - unlike a passive reamp, a passive DI pretty much requires a high quality, shielded, expensive transformer to actually be usable so even DIY you’re looking at $100+ for the transformer alone (but that’s more or less the full cost, since a passive DI is literally just a suitable transformer wired up to a pair of jacks an stuck inside a grounded metal enclosure - they sound great and are easy to build but probably not something you’d need in this case, they’re more for situations where you want to get a really nice DI bass sound or something).
The DIY reamp I swear by, though,
sonic mayhem
