OT: My Pedalboard Power Supply

[John Egerton]

Hey guys...

I have one of those expensive pedalboards with an internal power supply.

I recently discovered that my line6 dl-4 and my digitech whammy were not AC like is written on the case... They will in fact work with DC, all i needed to do was to widen the hole in my power jacks.

However... I have a lot of pedals on my board, some into the board directly, and some using the daisy chain method.

The problem is, the pedalboard has an overload circuit and so when I attach too many pedals it kicks in and cuts all poer to my board.

I was wondering what I can do about this as I hate to have lots of power leads all over the place for pedals that claim to need their 'special' power supply.

Is there a modification I could make to the existing power supply, or do you think I should make another power supply, with its own transformer, and stick it in parrallel with the power lead going into the transformer of the main pedalboard supply...

Thanks

John

[Ge_Whiz]

Pedals which use an AC power supply have a full-wave rectifier built-in, so they will also work with DC supplies of the correct voltage. Some digital pedals, however (such as those made by Digitech), have an ENORMOUS power consumption compared with analogue pedals - anything up to one whole amp. I don't know about the Line 6 but I bet it's high, too. These are what are causing your problem.

My advice - if you're not prepared to use the proprietary power supplies, get a secondary one which has a current rating somewhat higher than the Line 6 and Whammy combined. I wouldn't parallel it with the existing PSU - keep it independent.

[niftydog]

the overload protection is obviously there to protect the power supply. Any modifications that bypass this protection have the potential to damage the power supply. I wouldn't touch it. You're only choice is to build another power supply.

Measure the current draw of each of your pedals, as Ge_Whiz said, you may be surprised by the digital pedals hunger for power. Find the main culprit(s) and power it independently. There's plenty of information here and elsewhere on the net about making good DC power supplys.

I hope you are right about the AC pedals running on DC, because there are a couple of reasons why that won't work properly. For one, many AC powered pedals use bipolar op amp circuits. A circuit designed in this way is highly unlikely to work properly when fed DC instead. Make sure you rigorously test this theory by running the pedal as hard and extreme as you can.

[Ben N]

What is your power supply fed with, i.e., is there an external wall wart and just paralleled jacksin the board, or does the board have an AC cord running right into it?  If the latter, and the construction of the board allows it, perhaps you could install an AC outlet in the board, and just plug the Line 6 wall wart into that.  Before you cut anything, make sure the wall wart in that position doesn't induce any hum in your pedals.