1200 mA Space pedal works with H9 power supply?

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    • #165683
      joeydego
      Participant

      According to the pedals, this shouldn’t work. Seems there have been a couple versions of the Space pedal over the years. My pal has one marked 1200 mA and is using his 500 mA H9 power supply to power it. This shouldn’t be possible, as in the past my experience has been you can send more current to a pedal, but it wont work if you under current it, especially a digital pedal. 1200 mA seems unusually high, the only thing I can think is was this maybe a misprint? If not, how is this actually working?

    • #165685
      PRSGUY513
      Participant

      So you’re saying that the space pedal has 1200 mA marked directly on the pedal itself? According to the manual it should be 500 mA. I agree that 1200 mA is rather high. It must be a mistake.

      https://s3.amazonaws.com/com.eventide.downloads/Product+Manuals/SpaceManual.pdf

    • #165765
      noodle1
      Participant

      They definitely don’t continuously use 1200mA under normal conditions. I think when the units start up (with all the lights) it quickly flashes a few watts of power to flash LEDs/bypass settings, etc. But draw under load is significantly less.

      An example is the whammy reissue pedals. The whammy I have here says 1300mA but its running off the standard BOSS 500mA PSA supply. Using the cheap, larger 1300mAh supply that comes with the pedal actually sounds worse due to high frequency “whine” (The BOSS PSA is quieter on this particular pedal).
      9V*1.3A=11.7 Watts
      Checking the actual case with meter:
      = 2.7 Watts
      2.7/11.7
      SO… under normal conditions the whammy runs around 1/4 of its marked power rating.
      As far as I know ALL Factor pedals and H9 run off 4.5 Watts (~500mA) supply, 9-12VDC

    • #165796
      tstern
      Moderator
      Eventide Staff

      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.

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