Let’s Talk About Pedal Power
If you are, as I am, somewhat of a pedal geek, you know that getting the right power to your pedals is a real thing.
For those of us who may be inclined to use pedals that are more demanding than the commonplace units that don't need more than 9V or 100mA there are lots of inexpensive options out there. Yet when we read up on power supplies a couple of things come up very quickly. The first thing is that each power tap is fully isolated. Why we would care is simply noise. Some pedals are noisy. Some are really noisy. You don't want that transitioning to being electrically noisy down your chain. Even with good inexpensive chain supplies like the well respected OneSpot devices isolation can be a problem.
In my case, I have purchased a number of pedals that cannot get by with 100mA. Some have different power connections or flip the centre negative to centre positive and this starts to mean a plethora of wall warts. To be candid, I have found that some of these wall warts are not really well shielded and become little noise antennae all on their own.
What really struck me was the price jump from non-isolated to non-branded may be isolated supplies to name brand isolated supplies. Talk to a pro tech and they are using Voodoo Labs or Strymon power supplies. The rationale is proven reliability, flexible voltages, support for diverse connections and the ability to drive more amps to demanding pedals.
I am a fan of boutique stuff, or higher end kit, such as Strymon for example. Many of their products come with wall wart supplies because they are demanding of amperage. Some devices also sound better if you can feed them more power.
I was planning on buying a Strymon power system when I learned from my friend Charles of ElectricMojo Guitars about CIOKS.
I have had nothing but good success with Charles so I went with a DC7 unit. The connectors on the block are RCA style connectors so not the more standard DC power sleeves. The cables come with the unit, in a variety of lengths and with reversed polarity and ⅛ inch options. The greatest thing about the DC7 is that each output is selectable for one of 9, 12, 15 or 18 volts with plenty of mA available in every case. I have been very successful with the CIOKS except where I screwed up and used the wrong cable with a Diamond Halo Chorus and fried the voltage regulator. Diamond has excellent service and the repair was cheaper than what it cost me to ship the unit to them.
I mounted the CIOKS DC7 to the underside of a PedalTrain board. This particular board is for DI recording use and headphone practice only. Even with a full load of Strymon effects (it is an all Strymon board - except the Tuner) there is no problem and things sound fabulous.
When I started moving away from the OneSpot stuff, my first step was to one of the Donner units available on Amazon. Says that they are fully isolated, but I found that they were randomly glitchy. Promised LEDs worked only some of the time and I would get weird things. As I maintain a number of boards for different amps, the Donners were an inexpensive solution, but are proving to be suboptimal.
The other problem that I have run into, is my love of pedals in general. 7 or 8 power ports aren't enough, so either I needed multiple blocks or the ability to extend.
The DC7 has a 24V extender port to which you can connect other CIOKS products designed to be power extenders. The CIOKS 8 is such a product. It is powered from the DC7 and gives you an additional 8 fully switchable and fully isolated ports.
CIOKS 8
Even for a geek like me, this is enough. I also find the full isolation helpful as some of my boards are split with some of the pedals in front of the amp and others in the effects loop. Where I have encountered strangeness in the past with other supplies, no such thing is so with the CIOKS stuff.
CIOKS was founded in Denmark in 1991 by Poul Cioks. They are one of those small, highly focused manufacturers that do what they do extremely well and don't try to be everything to everyone. The boxes themselves are really tough and nice and compact. For the stage performer, they have the durability you would need and for the recording artist, they are perfectly silent.
I've tried more power supplies than I want to admit. For my use cases, with boutique pedals with different power demands, and wanting something reliable that was going to last and that would do what it says it would do while having lots of power availability, the CIOKS family is perfect.
If you want to buy a CIOKS, I will always recommend ordering from ElectricMojoGuitars
Thanks for reading and we will speak again soon.
