Which pedal power is better?

Hi there I'm thinking of getting one of these three pedal power available.. 01. Dunlop DC Brick 02. Voodoo Lab Pedal Power 4x4 03. Cioks DC-10 Can advice which one is better? I'm using 06 pedals and 02 of them are using 18v. Thanks all.
 
Hi Faisal. The difference between the DC brick and the voodoolab/cioks is that the DC brick is NOT an isolated power supply. Meaning they share the same ground. This might cause noise problems. Might. If you are currently using a one spot power supply or something similar without any noise issue, then its probably okay to get the DC brick. Pros are that it is A LOT lighter and also cheaper.

On the other hand, Cioks & voodoolab will both be a safe choice. Which ever you want to get will be fine. They are both isolated power supply and produces so called "clean" power. I recently just bought a cioks DC8 myself. First thing i noticed was that its really heavy! Hahah. But what to do, i was having noise issues with my pedals. It fixed the noise though :)
 
Hey Faisal,

I'm actually currently using a Dunlop DC Brick and a One spot to power my 11 pedals. I have 10 9V pedals and 1 18V pedal. The DC Brick has 7 9V outputs and 3 18V outputs, so I chain and one-spot my "back-tier" pedals that i dont use so much. I don't really have a problem with noise or anything, my pedals are pretty standard, some Boss, one Mesa, one Ibanez, one Korg tuner and a Catalinbread.

Whilst its true that isolated power supplies are supposed to eliminate noise via grounding, I think its overstated that "non-isolated" power supplies always produce noise. If you're using a one-spot to power 10 pedals, then maybe thats asking for it, but I've personally never had problems with my Dunlop DC Brick.

The price differential is also quite staggering. I managed to get my Dunlop DC brick second hand for 100. Whereas a Cioks DC10 or a similar Voodoo Labs would be at the very least 200 second hand, or 250-280 brand new.

Honestly, I think if you're using 6 9V and 2 18V, you're better off saving your money getting a DC Brick and using the extra money to jam more/upgrade other equipment like cables, etc.

Just my 2 cents man, but of course, its up to you.
 
"Noise" from pedalboard is very annoying. When the overall power output suffers, unwanted noise can ruin your perfect pedalboard setup. Your regular modulation/EQ pedals need about 100 mA each, whereas sophisticated distortion boxes, mammoth-sized digital delay/looper stompboxes can consume up to 700mA alone. Boss, Ibanez, Roctron, One Spot style adapters can give uniform 9 volts output, with max current 1500mA for up to 10 regular pedals.

Now, you need to make sure one thing:

Required Total current on Pedalboard is Less Than Total Pedalboard Available Current

If you can't ensure that, it is when you start to hear a swarm of bees buzzing fiercely through your set up.

Your Boss style adapter or Pedalboard brick power unit may go into a chaotic mode by trying to power up everything. So then you run into weird sound from the board without being able to determine the culprit.

OneSpot or Boss parallel daisy chained power adapters work best with pedals that demand the most mA current on your board. So you can hook up 1 -3 pedals which have extreme requirements to that adapter. The majority of the pedals with minimum current (mA) requirement can then be supported by any isolated DC brick supply you have got. To mention a few, it could be any one of these: CIOKS, Decibel Eleven HotStone, Voodoo Labs, Dunlop DC brick etc.

Bobby182 seems right. i.e. he may be running 2 different sources to power everything up so that there are tonnes of remaining Power juice left, not "killing" your power source after all.

Hope that helps. Cheers!
 
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Just to add, i had seen some people using isolated and yet there are some occassional noise/hum issues. in Using an isolated power supply, you have greater chance of eliminating unwanted noise but is not always a guarantee, you can still screw up if you are not careful with your wirings (using very long daisy chain instead of star wiring).

On the other side, non isolated power bricks tend to have a bad reputation. But it is not bad as it seems to be. When using non isolated supplies, you need to be careful on the length of the power cables and patch cables as you want to minimize the ground loop as much as you can. on isolated supplies you can eliminate the ground loop, but on non isolated supplies you can not eliminate ground loop but you can minimize it.
 
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