9v to 18v help

murraypops

Hi Folks, hoping someone can help.   I have a small board and reliable 9v power supply which, daisy chained, give me no problems.   I would like to power my Catalinbread delay at 18v without using a separate power supply.

I notice xotic/disaster area offer a solution however I suspect this won’t work as by doubling voltage you automatically double the power draw (xotic goes to 80ma and DA 100ma) and the catalinbread at 9v is 60.ma.

Anyone any ideas?

juansolo

Questions to ask yourself: What are the advantages of running the delay at 18v? If it's headroom, do you currently have issues with headroom? If you're just doing it because you can, then there's probably not that much benefit to it. Because if there was, I'd expect the pedal to run internally at 18v in the first place as it's only a few parts to do so.

Finally most delay ICs run at 5v for digital stuff (regulated down from 9v). The analogue MN3007 can run at 15v, and be worthy to do so. But again, if it was, I'd expect it to be doing that internally if the designer thought that was necessary. If it is a digital delay, you'll be asking the reg to dump a load more voltage, which will cause it to run much hotter.

Grunfeld

murraypops said:

I would like to power my Catalinbread delay at 18v without using a separate power supply....

Anyone any ideas?

I'm using a Cioks DC-5 for a PSU and one of the outputs can be 9v or 18v.
I've also got two Catalinbread delays on my board:
Belle Epoch
Echorec
I A/B'd between 9v and 18v many times. 
Conclusion:  the Belle Epoch sounds nicer, smoother, at 9v.
The Echorec has nothing in it really, perhaps just a smidgeon at 18v over 9v but nothing I could really hear at home and certainly not on stage.  I'm only running it at 18v because I can rather than because I need to.
But the BE at 9v was a surprise.  I expected it to sound nicer at 18v for some reason.  I suppose because double is more, and more must be "better."  Which it wasn't.

juansolo

Most small delays are based on the PT2399which is a digital delay IC and runs at 5v. It has it's own problems for example, in longer delay times they can be noisy, also they can clip. The only way to cut down on the noise is to use two delay ICs or to more aggressively filter it out. The clipping you can stop before it hits the IC which sounds better than the IC clipping. Voltage plays no part in doing anything with the idiosyncrasies that the PT2399 has as you simply can't increase it. So you'll only be increasing headroom in the rest of the circuit, which isn't the problem. 

The Echorec and Belle Epoch I'm fairly sure run a more modern Spin FV-1 (guessing here, never seen inside one), again fixed at 5v. So other than having fewer inherent issues, again it's unlikely to make much of difference having some of the rest of the circuit running with an 18v swing.

Basically unless you're running an old analogue delay that's specifically running a BBD designed to run at higher voltage, there's really not a lot of point in giving them more. Plus the old delays, more often than not, already gave them their optimal voltage internally.

As you say above, people get this thing in their head that more=better. In a lot of cases this isn't the case as if it were, you'd make it run at that internally. Everything I build runs on a 9V source. If you design an effect that runs better on 18v and don't fit a charge pump to do it, you're just being lazy and cheap.

ecc83

I agree with Juansolo, be it supply voltage, valve type, bias point etc, the guys that did the original design USUALLY did it right!

Unless you REALLY know what you are about, leave it TF alone!

Dave.

clarkefan

If your psu has a spare 9v output why not just buy a voltage doubling cable and try it?

And thanks for the heads up on drawing more current, I didn't know voltage doubling did that.

juansolo

It won't draw more current, it'll cause the reg to have to do more work and get much hotter as it'll have to get rid of 13v from an 18v feed, rather than 4v from a 9v feed. Digital delay ICs run at 5v (that I'm aware of) and the Catlinbread stuff will be digital.

clarkefan

What so the pedal isn't actually built properly to cope with 18v, like regardless of how it gets there?

Thanks for clarifying the current thing btw

Sassafras

I've always found the difference in using pedals at 18 volt compared to the original 9 volt hardly worth the trouble even when I've heard it said that the difference is night and day.

bbill335

The only pedal where I've heard a meaningful difference between 9v and 18v is the Hudson Broadcast. Never been able to try it at 24v.

juansolo

clarkefan said:

What so the pedal isn't actually built properly to cope with 18v, like regardless of how it gets there?

Thanks for clarifying the current thing btw

Oh it's Catlinbread so it's probably built properly. Just the delay IC will run at 5v so any increase in voltage will have to be dealt with to get it back down to 5v for the delay IC. The rest of the circuit could potentially run at 18v quite happily.

More voltage can make a difference with OD/boosts/distortion as it can give you more headroom, which might be what you want. Potentially. But as I say, circuits that work better with more voltage should have a charge pump internally to get that voltage, otherwise the designer was just being cheap.

My last note is just to say, that when it comes to pedal repairs, people over-volting effects* probably runs neck and neck with 3PDT stomp failure with us. There's a great possibility of components in a pedal not being able to take 24v... Again if you're designing an effect with a view to it running internally at that sort of voltage, you use appropriate parts. If you put 24v into an effect that the designer only ever expected to run at 9v, then there is a high possibility of popping it.

FWIW, every Klone we've ever fixed has been someone giving it too much power. They already run internally with a 27v swing inside (in places, it's a schizophrenically designed effect), you put an 18v source into it, you double that to 54v... That said the zener with pop first with that effect, so thankfully it doesn't take out anything else. Well it'll short your PSU, which might not like it.

Basically, whatever an effect says on it's box, give it that.

*which people rarely admit to... We can tell you know, and it makes our life immeasurably easier when it comes to fixing things if you tell us in the first place.

EricTheWeary

Catalinbread like voltage - the new Belle Epoch Deluxe runs at 35volts ( internal booster thing, I think it still takes a 9v supply) IIRC. 

Sporky

murraypops said:

by doubling voltage you automatically double the power draw (xotic goes to 80ma and DA 100ma) and the catalinbread at 9v is 60.ma.

I'm not sure that's true.

If you double the voltage and keep the current the same then the power doubles.

If you double the voltage and the current then the power quadruples.

If you double the voltage but keep the power the same then the current halves.

I can't see anything on the Catalinbread site that states that the current draw doubles at 18v - it'd be very odd indeed if that was the case.

Grunfeld

juansolo said:

More voltage can make a difference with OD/boosts/distortion as it can give you more headroom, which might be what you want. Potentially.

So, with the Catalinbread Belle Epoch the audible difference (as it sounded to me) between 9v and 18v in my simple A/B comparisons was when the input had been overdriven and/ or fuzzed.  The difference was not really there on clean input.  But most of the time I'm playing OD/ fuzz so that's what's important for me. 
If I get a moment I'll make a vid.  I don't know what the audible effect of having more headroom should sound like but to me it sounded perhaps a bit crisper, more defined.  And I preferred the smoother 9v sound. 

Sporky

The thing I'm unsure about is how it makes a difference unless you're running staggering volume boosts.

A hot 'bucker puts out what, 500mV peak-to-peak? To get that up to 8v peak-to-peak seems like more boost than is at all sensible.

murraypops

Cheers for all the help folks! I'm certain the repeats sound noticeably more pronounced at 18v but not sure about the logic behind it.

juansolo

Grunfeld said:

juansolo said:

More voltage can make a difference with OD/boosts/distortion as it can give you more headroom, which might be what you want. Potentially.

So, with the Catalinbread Belle Epoch the audible difference (as it sounded to me) between 9v and 18v in my simple A/B comparisons was when the input had been overdriven and/ or fuzzed.  The difference was not really there on clean input.  But most of the time I'm playing OD/ fuzz so that's what's important for me. 
If I get a moment I'll make a vid.  I don't know what the audible effect of having more headroom should sound like but to me it sounded perhaps a bit crisper, more defined.  And I preferred the smoother 9v sound. 

I mean more voltage into a OD/boost/distortion can give that more headroom, not an OD/boost/distortion into a higher voltage delay will. It all depends what part of the delay is running with more voltage and how much signal you're pushing through it. Like I say there are many parts to it, but the bit that's doing the delay is probably fixed voltage anyhow, which is why I find the whole concept confusing.

bbill335

The belle epoch has a preamp (which is always-on in buffer mode) so maybe that's what gets the extra headroom. 

That said, you'd have to really push it to get it to clip at 9v

juansolo

If they're running a Spin FV-1 they run at 3.3v