Voodoo Labs Iso 5 - Total Garbage

[Blille]

Haha!

I really mean no disrespect and Strymon makes incredible gear. I have to laugh though because one of my friends has two pedal boards full of Strymon stuff. He is a dad, a lawyer and he also plays in a Mega Church.

FWIW, he is able to get all kinds of great tones from those pedals.

Not a coincidence

I haven’t bought any but they do make some solid pedals.

 

[Bogner]

I have a 1 Flint and H9 on my board -so I too know how bad*ss the Strymon and Eventide stuff is. Agree

My Eventide and Cioks references were for power supplies since that is what the thread was based upon. I will be quick to say Eventide does make some wonderful products of which I have several....along with Strymon.

Side note on awesome pedals, I am surprised Source Audio Nemesis and Ventris don't get any love around here. Both are absolutely amazing IMO.

 

[NegativeEase]

My Eventide and Cioks references were for power supplies since that is what the thread was based upon. I will be quick to say Eventide does make some wonderful products of which I have several....along with Strymon.

Side note on awesome pedals, I am surprised Source Audio Nemesis and Ventris don't get any love around here. Both are absolutely amazing IMO.

I've used the Nemesis -it's great but know nothing of the Ventris.

 

[GuitarStv]

I've used the Nemesis -it's great but know nothing of the Ventris.

Ventris is very, very cool. Expensive as fuck, but it does rotary speaker sounds better than anything else I've heard.

 

[NegativeEase]

I'll be totally surprised if Voodoo doesn't make you whole. No other pedal companies fortunes rely so heavily on good word of mouth on power distro systems.

 

[GuitarStv]

Anyone ever contacted Voodoo Labs before? How many weeks does it usually take to get a response?

 

[NegativeEase]

Anyone ever contacted Voodoo Labs before? How many weeks does it usually take to get a response?

I think I gotta guy for you -lemme check

 

[Blille]

I think I gotta guy for you -lemme check

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

 

[NegativeEase]

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro

Apparently my guy aint my guy.... no response.

 

[Masta' C]

One thought I had reading the original post...if you mounted the power supplies directly below the pedals or very close to them, there is a chance you were experiencing interference from the transformers. I've heard of this happening with other toroidal power supplies and some pedals can be particularly sensitive.

 

[GuitarStv]

One thought I had reading the original post...if you mounted the power supplies directly below the pedals or very close to them, there is a chance you were experiencing interference from the transformers. I've heard of this happening with other toroidal power supplies and some pedals can be particularly sensitive.

The noise does get better on a couple pedals if it's physically moved about two feet away from them (which is as far as the longest power cable that I've got that will plug in goes) but that's not the main problem.

The Empress trem and SD Deja Vu are very noisy as long as they're plugged into a Voodoo Labs supply, and the 18V supply from either iso 5 (when it works) introduces noise into the Deja Vibe. All of the issues disappear completely when using a daisy chained 1-spot and the wall-wart that came with the Deja Vibe.

 

[Dudeman7]

Hmm. It has been a long time since I dealt with them but they replied in less than a day.

If email doesn't get them moving, maybe try calling them? (Not sure if you have already done this.)

 

[NegativeEase]

GuitarSTV, apparently Voodoo did some customer support staff adjustments from the last time I needed them or they are way way busy or don't care

-I got no where trying to contact the dudes who helped me with some OEM stuff I was looking for. They were super helpful when I was building road systems for some big touring acts -maybe that's what they care about.

 

[IMENATOR]

Anyone ever contacted Voodoo Labs before? How many weeks does it usually take to get a response?

Just call them if you need faster response. I work for a tech support company, I know how it works

 

[GuitarStv]

Just call them if you need faster response. I work for a tech support company, I know how it works

I've called them twice and was unable to get through. Guess we'll try their forums next.

 

[GuitarStv]

Tried the forums, but I the message I wrote won't be posted until an administrator OK's it. : S

Hopefully they have someone manning the forum since I couldn't get a live person on the phones and haven't got an email response other than "Thanks for sending us a question, we'll get back to you soon!".a week and a half ago.

 

[Bill Dennis]

I've been using a couple 1-spot adapters and a daisy chain to power a medium sized pedalboard.

Currently running eight pedals - Empress Tremolo, SD Deja Vu Delay, Boss BD-2, SP Compressor, a Fuzz I built, a Mooer E-Lady flanger, and a Korg Pitchblack tuner. I've also got a newer Deja Vibe but was using the 18v adapter it came with.

Figured I'd like to simplify things on the board, so I bought a couple Voodoo Labs Pedal Power Iso 5s. They've got modular cables, multiple 9V 100mA isolated outputs, and would let me run the SP compressor and the Deja Vibe at 18 volts each. Finally got around to tearing apart the whole board, fixed the power supplies to the bottom and plugged everything in last night. It was noisy as ****.

So, first I thought that maybe there was something wrong with my guitar. Swapped guitars, no problem. Then I thought I maybe had a bad cable. Pulled and tested every cable on the board - no problem. Finally I unplugged the power from my trem pedal while it was in bypass - big reduction in noise. Huh. Weird. So I kept unplugging things - Deja Vu dropped the noise a bunch, Tuner did too, as did the flanger, and the compressor. I tried swapping connections from one of the Voodoo Labs Pedal Power bricks to the other - they are both garbage. Finally, I re-connected the 1-spot daisy chain that I had been using. Beautiful and silent once more.

Are you sharing power ports for anything? You need to be very careful with what you combine or you will create ground loops. Only use the splitter from VL that have ground lifted on one side. Don't share ports where one pedal is in front of amp and the other is in the loop. Any loop based pedals should be 100% isolated from anything in front. I also try to combine pedals that are next to each other in series wherever possible. Some pedals just don't like being too close to the power supply. Try moving somethings around.

 

[GuitarStv]

Are you sharing power ports for anything? You need to be very careful with what you combine or you will create ground loops. Only use the splitter from VL that have ground lifted on one side. Don't share ports where one pedal is in front of amp and the other is in the loop. Any loop based pedals should be 100% isolated from anything in front. I also try to combine pedals that are next to each other in series wherever possible. Some pedals just don't like being too close to the power supply. Try moving somethings around.

Nope. No sharing with the voodoo labs iso 5s - each pedal was on it's own port. Daisy chaining all the pedals that were being noisy with the Iso 5 and plugging them into a 1-spot completely eliminates all noise though.

It seems like moving the Iso 5 power supplies physically further from the pedals slightly reduces noise when pedals are plugged into the Voodoo Labs stuff. But even with the Iso 5s mounted under the board when I power up with the 1-spot there's no problem at all. The issue is 100% certainly with the two Iso 5s power supplies.

What I'm not clear about at the moment is if this is some freak problem that somehow has broken in both of these two Iso 5s from different batches and years, or if it's a more fundamental design problem that with them power supplies.

 

[Dudeman7]

I'm interested to know what is causing this too. Having similar issues with a different manufacturer's power supply was really frustrating.

Proximity effect interference is one thing but what you are describing sounds like a grounding problem to me. Bottom line is that it shouldn't happen with any isolated power supply.

Mine was nerve wracking since my modulation pedals were audible when they were bypassed. The noise changed if I turned the rate controls on any pedal with an LFO. No such issues with the 1-Spot or the Voodoo Lab Pedal Power 3+.

 

[GuitarStv]

I'm interested to know what is causing this too. Having similar issues with a different manufacturer's power supply was really frustrating.

Proximity effect interference is one thing but what you are describing sounds like a grounding problem to me. Bottom line is that it shouldn't happen with any isolated power supply.

Mine was nerve wracking since my modulation pedals were audible when they were bypassed. The noise changed if I turned the rate controls on any pedal with an LFO. No such issues with the 1-Spot or the Voodoo Lab Pedal Power 3+.

Yeah, I think it's somehow a combination of the power supply and the effects and it does seem to be LFO related.

When I have the empress trem bypassed I can hear static/noise pulsing in time with the effect (which I can tell from the LED over the tap tempo button). I don't understand electrically how that could be happening. I'd think that there was something going wrong with the bypass on the pedal except that the problem disappears as soon as I use a 1-spot to power it. Similar deal with the Deja Vu Delay - the noise seems to be tied to the tap tempo somehow. With the Vibe pedal I thought it was a problem all the time initially, but I usually have the rate set very low. When increased, I could hear that the noise is somehow tied to the tempo of the modulation.