Me too I’m just not able to swing 12 channels of quality DIs at the moment.
Since you have looked at the schematic, can you see a way to cut phantom from one set of physical inputs?? If that were possible then I could essentially have dedicated line inputs.
What I would personally do in that situation, and the cheapest way (for Free) to be protected would be to dedicate some channels of the mixer for Line Inputs and in those channels I would remove (desolder) one leg of the 390r resistor after the 48V switch.
I would desolder one leg of it from the PCB and put heatshrink tube around it so that it could be reversed back to stock easily in the future in case needed.
This way you don't need any DI boxes, you don't need to spend money on DI boxes, you are protected from phantom power because it's not reaching the input anylonger, and don't forget that besides the Line inputs you can still use those channels for Dynamic microphones in case you need to use the Mic Pres
I not saying this is the only solution, or the best of all solution, other people might have much better ideas,
I'm just saying that this would be what I would do in a pinch in the situation you described
I’m pretty certain I’ve accidentally sent phantom into my apogee converters outputs with this strange setup.. no issues thus far :/
Im assuming some output sections are capable of handling phantom without issue??
Many Output sections and output IC's have phantom power protection,
but not all have, and we never know which ones are protected and the ones that aren't...
So the best thing to do is to never send Phantom power into a Line level output.
People that are not well versed on Bantam Patchbays do that mistake easilly all the time.