I can clear this up a little. It isn’t a misprint, but it is a hazard of maintaining a product line over more than a decade.
All responsibly-designed products’ specs (including power requirements) include a safety margin to cover both unexpected contingencies and incorrectly-specified external gear (such as p0wer supplies that fall short of their own listed specs).
When we first released the Factor pedal series and Space, Eventide had very little experience with external power supplies (most of the previous products used mains AC power and converted to DC internally). Beyond that, the pedal power supply world was as-yet-untamed, so many Boss-style supplies were providing far less than 500mA (recall that the Boss system was originally designed as an alternative to 9V batteries). The Factor pedals clearly used more power than the normal Boss-style power supplies would provide at the time, so we applied a safety margin to the specification, packaged power supplies that would meet that current draw, and moved on.
Fast forward many years, a few things have changed:
- Updated software has reduced the amount of power the pedals draw.
- The power supplies people are using have become more reliable, users are more literate when it comes to power supplies, and more products in the market operate in our normal range for power draw.
- We’ve become more confident with our safety margins, as we’ve grown more sure that the product would never draw the maximum current that its parts hypothetically could support.
As a result, we’ve been able to update the listed specifications (and the power supplies we ship) for the Factor pedals and Space to 500mA current draw at 9V. The one thing that hasn’t changed is the screen printing on the rear panels of the pedals that we sold before we updated the specs.
