In my previous posting I wrote extensively about my experience building several generations of guitar pedalboards, and ended my discussion by suggesting that one last action I might take would be to replace the board’s power supply. I was using a Pedaltrain Spark, which fit flush to the underside of the board and offered 5 independent power channels ranging from 100mA’s to 500mA’s. Since I had 11 pedals on the board, it required daisy chaining some of them to shared power channels, which depending on how they were arranged could create unwanted amp noises.
To the left, you can see one of the great advantages of the Spark. It was designed to mount neatly and efficiently under a Pedaltrain board. My guess is that because of the limited number of isolated channels, the device may not have sold many units; consequently, the Pedaltrain company ceased production. After detaching the Spark from my main board, I will use it as an external power source for my smaller detachable board which currently only holds two pedals.
When building the 3rd generation board, I became a bit of a Walrus fanboy, so when I tumbled onto the fact that they manufacture a power supply that offers 15 isolated channels, I decided to acquire one to replace the Spark. Here’s a short promo for the device Walrus… it’s “homemade” affect is amusing and endearing:
To the right, you can see the underside of the board with the Spark removed and the Walrus Phoenix poised for installation. Eventhough the Phoenix was designed to fit neatly beneath a Pedaltrain board, there was no readily apparent way to mount it. Sadly the existing Spark mounting hardware would not work and Walrus discontinued their mounting kit, which did not look that effective to begin with. There are examples on YouTube of people drilling holes into their boards to mount a Phoenix, but I am reluctant to do so. Any wrong move with the drill and a big mess could be made!
You’ll note also in the above image that I had to pull several of the pedals off the board to get enough access to remove the Spark and subsequently mount the Phoenix. This was not a problem as I intended to rewire the whole board with fresh George L cable to ensure that my patch cords were as good as I could make them!
Instead, I opted to go with Scotch fastener strips. They’re like velcro fasteners, but on steroids. Three strips fit across the width of the Phoenix and I pressed it down onto an underside cross-member of the board. There is a bit of wobble because only about half of the Phoenix’s width is held to the board, so this is not an ideal, apocalypse-resistant mounting, but sometimes “good enough” can be “good enough.”
The Phoenix arrives from Walrus packaged with a generous supply of longish power cords to connect pedals to the power supply. The channels are either 100mA or 300mA which covers a wide range of pedal power needs. Some of the 100mA channels can be switched between 9 volts or 12 volts and one even goes to 18 volts. Sadly the 18 volt channel is only powered at 100mA because my Origin Effects Cali76 Stacked Compressor would benefit from the added head-room the 18 volts would give it, but it requires 108mA at that voltage which exceeds the 100mA of my 18 volt channel. I contacted Origin Effects to see if I could get by on 100mA but they never responded. The Walrus people think I should give the 18 volt set up a try. Perhaps I will in time.
To the right, you can see the finished installation of the Walrus Phoenix onto the Pedaltrain board. The eleven power cords that I deployed bundled up very cleanly with zip ties.
The results of my rewiring the George L signal chain patch cords are also partially visible under the board. The pedal to pedal patches were made with red wire. The noise suppressor loop was made with blue and black wires. The blue wires identify the loop feeding into the Boss suppressor and the black wires feed back into the unsuppressed portion of the signal chain.
Below is the finished job as seen from above:
Even with the rewiring and addition of a pro quality power supply, there is a modest hum that can be heard from the amp until the Boss Noise suppressor is activated. The Boss NS-2 cleans up that last bit of hum! Winning…
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