Excellent work, from both you and T-Rex. Glad it was such a simple fix and it's working again. There is a general lesson to be learned here so indulge me with a little preaching time.
We guitarists are too often made to believe that a piece of tech is "absolutely essential" to our rig when the truth is, it's a possible solution to a few rare problems but in most cases it only adds complexity that will bite you in the backside in the future. Basically, it will cost you hard earned cash for no improvement and the real risk of future issues. I would ask, why do you need a UPS for your guitar gear? UPSs are usually used for backup protection of computer systems where there is a genuine need to guard against data loss in the event of a power outage. Does our guitar gear have that same requirement? I understand you may have just been using it because it was the nearest outlet to your practice setup but could you be using that setup for gigging? The point does bear thinking about in the wider sense.
It's one of those pieces of kit that can too easily be sold to us when there is absolutely no real need at all. Another simple example is the pedal board power supply at over £150 a piece! Nowadays they have to be isolated. They have to be hifi quiet. They have to have a cool name which other guitarists will recognise and genuflect to. Well - - - no they don't in any way. If your pedals react to each other and hum then you have a problem in your pedals which should be chased down and fixed, not in the power supply feeding them. "Ground Loop" is a buzzword used by many sellers to get us to bite, (or to cover up the fact they don't really understand what is going on.) A ground loop exists because one piece of equipment does not have a well implemented rock solid grounding scheme and interacts with another. That is poor design!
If you have excessive hiss and high frequency noise then you have a problem with your pedals, either in their susceptibility to high frequency fields from things like fluorescent lights or digital gear, or they have such poor power supply rejection ratios in their circuitry they should never have been put on sale. The idea that any decently designed PSU has such high levels of hiss that it breaks through into a piece of guitar gear is absolutely laughable to a designer. Ultra low noise top notch hifi has that requirement. Guitar gear absolutely does not. I can put out PSUs by the hundreds with everyday components which cost less than £2 a piece retail costs, (without casing of course), and which have extremely low noise levels, and so can any decent designer. Voodoo? I genuinely wouldn't touch one at their "exotic" prices for unnecessary features!
You would be stunned at how many expensive "boutique" pedals are out there at astronomic prices which are genuinely sub £5 worth of cheap components in a pretty box, or which are even disasters in design!!! My own pedal board is powered by a cheap Chinese Caline PSU which is rock steady, quiet, non-isolated and cost me about £15 when I bought it years ago. They are still around now under other names for not too much more than that. It has always been perfect for my good set of common non-boutique pedals which you would expect to be designed much more "hit and miss" than something you have paid £250 for. I actually now run it from an 18V Makita power tool battery with a specialist slip on head purely to remove the need for another long lead from a wallwart. It is absolutely brilliant. But - I have sorted out the pedals I use and made sure there is no unusual power switching or anything else to cause bad interactions. Would you solve a problem in your car brakes by fitting a high tech drone parachute? It would work - once - expensively! It's NASA recommended as used on the Space Shuttle! Why not just fix your car brakes first?
In electronics you don't solve problems which don't exist, and if they do exist you identify the real causes and fix that. Unless you are a marketing manager that is. Remember people are living a fantastic high lifestyle by selling us this kind of unnecessary gear on the back of unrealistic problems. We can be a member of the "cool club" or we can be a real world thinker, the choice is ours.
Anyway, chatting over, the point should be made to a few who may need to think about this, (not necessarily yourself Brivington.) Enjoy that amp and a beer is owed to T-Rex if you ever get together.
Home
