Truetone 1 Spot Pro CS12 power supply

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xtian
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Truetone 1 Spot Pro CS12 power supply

Post by xtian »

I just joined the CS12 party. Finding a brick with 9vAC output for my Line 6 M9 was important. Previously, I used the Modtone Power Plant -- very good unit, but only eight iso outputs total. The CS12 is very nice. Of course I popped it open. Very easy to access, looks simple to get under the PCB, good build, toroidal transformer.

[img:1600:854]http://www.superconductormusic.com/pub/pix/cs12.jpg[/img]

[img:1600:874]http://www.superconductormusic.com/pub/ ... board1.jpg[/img]

[img:1600:828]http://www.superconductormusic.com/pub/ ... board2.jpg[/img]
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Re: Truetone 1 Spot Pro CS12 power supply

Post by randalp3000 »

been using one for a few months now. Replaced my voodoo mondo.
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Re: Truetone 1 Spot Pro CS12 power supply

Post by xtian »

Why'd you switch from the Mondo? Did you need a 9vAC output also?

I just discovered that one tap on my new CS12 was putting out only 1.5vDC. Not only did Chicago Music Exchange reply to me on Sunday, they are sending a replacement, a return shipping tag, and $10 off. Nice!
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Re: Truetone 1 Spot Pro CS12 power supply

Post by randalp3000 »

I switched to save some room and weight and it will power my Korg SDD-3000
R.G.
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Re: Truetone 1 Spot Pro CS12 power supply

Post by R.G. »

Full disclosure: I work for the company that makes that power supply.

You know this already, I think, but in case you have somehow missed it:

Death by electrocution lurks inside that box, just like it does for every AC mains powered box.

Everything "north" of that row of nine heat sink flags, including most especially the AC mains connectors and wiring, and the heat sink tabs on the two power devices at right angles is electrically live to the AC mains. Of course, most of the traces on the bottom are too. Just like in any AC powered item, if you pull it open and start tinkering around inside, you can get anything from an unpleasant shock to sudden death.

I designed switching power supplies for a fair amount of my professional life, and I don't go opening them up unless there is a clear and present need to do so. One moment's inattention and you could be dead. I get all twitchy and jumpy seeing someone who's not a professional open a switching power supply up. It's really dangerous.

The CS 12 and its baby brother the CS 7 are nice boxes, and I'm happy with how they came out. But please don't get yourself killed playing with it. We have too few good musicians to lose more of them. :shock:
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Re: Truetone 1 Spot Pro CS12 power supply

Post by xtian »

That's a good safety reminder, RG. And NICE WORK!

Got the replacement music from Chicago, dropped it in place. Everything works, and my rig is super quiet. Happy.

-a
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Re: Truetone 1 Spot Pro CS12 power supply

Post by rooster »

Wow, that looks like a perfect power supply for your rig. And what a diverse rig it looks to be! :shock: Very cool.

But some questions for RG? First off I'm a long time fan of the much less complicated 1.7A One Spot and it's predecessor (was it 1A?), using a One Spot daisy chain.

Anyway, about 6 months ago I picked up a Stryman Lex pedal (digital obviously) and it doesn't like the One Spot, either joined in union with my other pedals powered by a One Spot or when I use two One Spots, one exclusive to the Lex. OK, I accept this fact, and instead use the One Spot for the bulk of my pedals and the power supply that Strymon supplies with the Lex. (I also use batteries on my octave pedal and my wah because they just sound better to my ear - and I do have to remember to unplug those two devices when I'm done playing.)

So my first question is this, why does the Stryman power supply not create added hum and the One Spot does? They are both non-transformer based devices after all. Question number two, I notice that Mike Fuller praises the use of transformers in a power supply and disses all other types - and now you endorse both types. What is the reason you pursued a transformer based multi power supply after being involved with the non-transformer based One Spot? The CS 12 looks to be a well designed and complicated power supply - does it take a transformer based power supply to create a multi pedal (digital and analog) pedalboard?
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Re: Truetone 1 Spot Pro CS12 power supply

Post by R.G. »

rooster wrote:But some questions for RG? First off I'm a long time fan of the much less complicated 1.7A One Spot and it's predecessor (was it 1A?), using a One Spot daisy chain.
The 1 Spot is a good solution unless you run into a situation that it just can't cope with. The 1 Spot was introduced into the pedal market at a time when pedals were much more straightforward than they have become today, and that will color much of what I'm about to say.

When the 1 Spot was introduced, the high water mark for pedal complexity was the Boss/Ibanez stuff, with several dual opamps, and maybe some BBD delay chips. Today, you have pedals with digital signal processing computers inside, like...
Anyway, about 6 months ago I picked up a Stryman Lex pedal (digital obviously)

These are special purpose computers with processing power that the Navy's submarine sonar program would have killed (literally!) for not that long ago. And the digital logic needs special power, usually high current 5V, or more likely 3.3V or less for today's chips.
and it doesn't like the One Spot, either joined in union with my other pedals powered by a One Spot or when I use two One Spots, one exclusive to the Lex.
So it's not surprising that given a need for LOTS of power, and specialized, low-voltage power at high currents, they have special power needs. I am not familiar with the Lex or other Strymon products other than the know they are DSP products, and that the guys are good DSP coders with a fast DSP engine.

Digital pedals in general either come with their own specialized wall wart or accept low voltage DC in the 8 to ??12?? range, and then convert that into what they need inside. Very often, this is a switching down-converter/regulator. That style power uses a series switch, usually a MOSFET for speed, and chops the incoming DC into chunks of varying duty cycle, then uses an inductor/capacitor filter to smooth that out for use in the rest of the circuit. And that's where the problems start.
OK, I accept this fact, and instead use the One Spot for the bulk of my pedals and the power supply that Strymon supplies with the Lex

That's a very sensible solution. Use a single solution as long as it works, then use a special purpose solution for what can't be made to fit.
So my first question is this, why does the Stryman power supply not create added hum and the One Spot does? They are both non-transformer based devices after all.
There are a lot of things that Mother Nature hides from us under a veil of simplicity. For instance - Galileo and later Isaac Newton revolutionized human understanding of motion. Newton's Laws were a foundation of all scientific study that involved motion - right up until Einstein produce dramatically different views of motion linked to the nature of space and time itself. Turns out that Einstein's view reduces to Newton's view at the low speeds and energies that Newton could see, and that we deal with in our daily lives. Newton produced an extremely useful approximation of the more complete view, but the reality was very hidden.

The answer to your question - why does the Strymon power supply work with the specialized unit it's intended for, and the 1 Spot not so well - is that the Strymon effect has special needs, and the 1 Spot is intended to play well with all the pedals it possibly can. And there are a few of those glossed-over realities hidden in there.

High speed, high current switching, which heavy-digital pedals need, creates high current transients on every conductor involved with the power supply. The logic chips and board try to cope with this by decoupling on the boards, but they can only do so much. And because it's digital, they only have to filter it out so a "one" is still a "one", a "zero" still "zero", and they can ignore that messy analog stuff in the middle. But while we think that Georg Ohm (Ohm's Law) had it right and teach our electronics beginners this, that covers over the deeper reality of Maxwell's Equations of how electromagnetism works, really. Much like relativity and spacetime reduce to Newton's Laws, Maxwell's Equations reduce to Ohm's Law in certain low frequency cases.

Which is a long winded way of saying that the high speed current and voltage stuff going on in the digital pedals cause current transients that escape out onto the power supply that is supplying the pedal. If the power supply that is supplying the digital pedal is itself a switching device, it is also making high voltage/high current transients, and the set of both of these sets of interfering hash duke it out on the supply lines.

Although both the switching power supply and the switching/digital pedal try mightily to suppress it, you get interference between the two different sets of leftover grack on the lines. If any of that interference produces products that are in the audio range, you wind up hearing them to some extent. You have almost certainly heard something similar in your cell phone. Sometimes there is a robotic squarking sound in the background. That is the voices "interfered with" by the many layers of analog-to-digital-to-analog conversion in the signal path. Switching power supplies and digital/switching pedals do something similar, but the signal reduced to squarking is the audio remanents in the pedal and the AC power line ripple in the switching power supply.

Hold on, we're getting there. :D

How free of hum, noise, and other artifacts the combination is depends on the design of the switching power supply and pedal. The 1 Spot folks (me and mine... :lol: ) have worked and continue to work long and hard to make the 1 Spot work for all pedals, all the time. A pedal manufacturer does not have that incentive. They want to sell their pedal as inexpensively (... switching into advert-speak...) as possible, and to the overall product, the power supply is just an expense, adds no function except nothing works without it. So while I'm sure manufacturers don't try to make power needs that other people cannot meet ( :roll: ), neither do they put a lot of effort into making sure that someone else's power supply can run their box.

The way we put it at Truetone (formerly Visual Sound) is that we're one of the few companies that focus on effects systems and the whole pedal signal chain, not one or two pedals at a time.

So the bottom, bottom, bottom line is that there are switching pedals that for one reason or another have power supply noise and needs that we have not (yet!) been able to shoehorn into a single, simple works-everywhere power supply.

The CS 7 and CS 12 were another attempt to cover more pedals without letting the complexity get out of hand. Many of these digital switchers need a low voltage AC supply, and that's why the 9Vac transformer/output is in the CS 12, for that need. We reached a place in the drive to more technical sophistication for integrated pedal power systems where a 9Vac transformer was the most cost effective way to meet the need.

I've deliberately side-stepped the heavily technical side of this discussion to make it more comprehensible. If you want to bore more deeply, ask about places where I've made it clear as mud and we'll dig in there. :shock:
Question number two, I notice that Mike Fuller praises the use of transformers in a power supply and disses all other types - and now you endorse both types.

One version of Murphy's Law is that for any complex problem, there is a simple answer/explanation that is concise, elegant - and incomplete or wrong. :?
I have interacted with Mike Fuller directly on a number of occasions. Mike is a clever guy with good ears and a good business sense. I do not know what Mike would say about this, but I guess that it would condense down to the idea that Mike Fuller is solving a different problem. He's building pedals, not power supplies. From the standpoint of a pedal builder, they would rather not mess with power supply issues, they just want the pedals to work, and they - rightly! - put their time into making the pedals sound good.

Life was simpler when a pedal either worked with a 9V battery or not. Then batteries got to costing $2.50 to $3.00 each, and guitarists went from one pedal ( ... in my teenage years, the guy who owned the fuzz pedal got to play lead :lol: ) to dozens.

I'm guessing that Mike has noticed, with no doubt thousands of examples, that a simple wall-frequency transformer supply, perhaps one per pedal, causes a lot less problems. He's right, it does. One battery per pedal is even more problem free, excepting that his customers demand a DC input jack. He's solving how he makes his pedals sound clean.

And - I'll try to say this delicately - not all small switching power supplies have had the same attention to minimizing noise as we try to put into the 1 Spot. Some are simply rebranded off-the-shelf items that can be sold quickly and cheaply. Not throwing rocks, just sayin'... So it's entirely possible that Mike has had to deal with a whole list of people saying that their 1 Spot (which is what most people call every 9V switching adapter, we get it all the time) is causing noise. Not surprising that he might think that switching supplies in general cause issues. It's the part of the elephant that he touches.

I'm trying to solve how to make every pedal, from the one-transistor-wonders of the 1960s to the DSPs of 2016 run on one power supply. So while I don't really know why Mike holds his opinions, I'm guessing that if we had an omniscient God-view of the reasons, they might turn out that way.
What is the reason you pursued a transformer based multi power supply after being involved with the non-transformer based One Spot?

Not all that complicated. We make tools for musicians. You use a tool when it can do the job at hand, and extend it when you run into situations where the first tool couldn't handle a newer, bigger job.

The 1 Spot is (IMHO :D ) a good solution to most pedalboards. It's powerful and quiet, as proven by a whole lot of real-world use. For situations where a 1 Spot and a daisy chain can't do it, usually a second $30 1Spot fixes the issue.

But the 1Spot and its ilk have broken the domination of the 9V battery for pedals. People will now buy pedals that need other than 9V, where in my memory they would not. So people want not just 9V at 10-100ma per pedal, but 9V at an amp; or 12V, 18V, and a few 24V; some need fifty pedals on a board, some of which are DSP power- ho... er, power hungry devices :lol: Having broken Pandora's Box open, we're now faced with questions about why we can't power everything.

The answer is - we're trying to. :D May take some more tools. We'll go make them for you.
The CS 12 looks to be a well designed and complicated power supply - does it take a transformer based power supply to create a multi pedal (digital and analog) pedalboard?

Another variant of the question which sounds like it ought to have a simple, elegant answer, but which doesn't.

There is no reason for the average guitarist to need a master's degree in electronics to understand pedalboards. Well, OK, not yet. But here are some of the issues in play.

"Transformer" power supplies could be made fine for all pedals, excepting that they are expensive, heavy, hot, magnetically noisy, the list goes on. But it is possible to solve pedal power issue that way. You might need thirty pounds of iron and copper for your pedal board to do it. People tend to not like that, and have voted with their wallets for small, integrated switching power supplies, like the 1 Spot.

But in the USA, wall-frequency power supplies are now illegal to import or sell, except in special cases. Remember the "Energy Star" program? That was the visible aspect of the legislation to make the world green, lush, and happy by forbidding things like incandescent light bulbs and "energy wasting" wall warts. Non-switching wall warts are now illegal to import or sell.

Truetone (Visual Sound) has consistently followed every rule and regulation on the books for our products, so the 1 Spot and CS series do in fact get inspected and certified for full USA, CE, etc. safety conformance and EMI/radio interference AND energy efficiency. While there are some units in the musical power supplies market that might skip a couple of steps on these regulations, we don't.

So we *can't* provide you with wall-frequency transformer supplies. As best we understand it, it's illegal in the USA. That's part of what the CS series is trying to solve. For most situations, use a 1 Spot and a daisy chain. It's simple, cheap, and proven to be effective. If there are special cases, first use a second 1 Spot if you can. If you have really complicated systems, or noise problems that can't be solved cost efficiently in other ways, use the CS 7 or CS 12, which add the next step in de-noising, isolation of the grounds where the pedals involved can't "play nice" with each other on the grounds.

So again I've wandered around the question with background info to arrive at a simpler answer. Sorry. You knew I was long winded when you asked. :lol:

Does it take a transformer based power supply to create a multi pedal board? Mostly no.

The preponderance of all pedalboards work fine from one daisy-chained 1 Spot, or a couple of them for next-harder cases. Some pedals introduce ground noise when working in conjunction with another switching power supply; these tend to be the bigger, fancier digital pedals. Just like on the school yard, not all pedals play nice with each other. For hard cases, you may need ground isolated outputs.

We've tried hard to put off that solution, because isolated grounds are expensive to make and sell. But the rising power needs and complexity of pedalboard systems have forced us to provide more expensive solutions. Sorry - we tried.

But "transformer supplies" are not a viable solution any more. New ones can't be imported or sold legally. I know I'm taking the risk of setting off a rush of "they don't make them like this any more" runs on vintage, NOS transformer power supplies, which is just silly, but will inevitably happen.

This reminds me of the internet wisdom on output transformers a few years back. Grizzled amp techs and transformer "gurus" insisted that only paper-bobbin transformers sounded good. Pure nonsense. The magnetic fields in a transformer can't even see or DETECT the difference between plastic and paper bobbins. Both are as transparent as free space to an M-field. What matters is the way the wires are wound inside, but of course, the average guitarist can't see that at all.

Transformer power supplies (which is a misnomer; all power supplies use isolating transformers inside, the switchers just use little ones, not big mains frequency ones) can be seen by the average guitarist as different. So the uninformed, non-technical advice is "use transformer power supplies, not those switchers". OK, as far as it goes. But I've designed noisy "transformer" power supplies in my life. Not proud of it, but it can be done. :lol: I have also designed very quiet switching power supplies, and I am proud of that. It's harder.

In the future, we're all going to have to use really well-designed switching power supplies. So Truetone is off an running on making those tools for you.
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Re: Truetone 1 Spot Pro CS12 power supply

Post by NickC »

Thanks R.G.! Fantastic explanation and one of the reasons I love this forum, and the great folks that contribute to it.

Respect!
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Re: Truetone 1 Spot Pro CS12 power supply

Post by xtian »

Bravo!
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Re: Truetone 1 Spot Pro CS12 power supply

Post by rooster »

RG....WOW!! This a beautiful and concise (concise enough for me!) explanation as any that I will ever read, I'm sure.

THANK YOU FOR TAKING THE TIME TO DO THIS!! It is not often that I have asked a question that is answered so completely. A genius with many talents, yet here you are explaining a complex problem that quotes electronic history (along with it's personal anecdotes) to help explain the past, present, and future of efx pedals and their power supplies. Amazing.
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