Daisy Chain Question

[tungngruv]

First off, THANKS to all the people who post answers to my questions I've posted. I'm getting ready to make my own Daisy Chain and want to make sure I'm not going to fry any pedals. Is the chain negative to negative etc..... and positive to positive etc...? I also have to have three - tip and two + tip in the chain so as long as I keep track of the negative wire and route it to the correct contact, it will be safe to use, right? Once again, thanks for any help.

[petemoore]

GEO Spyder article...good reads about power supplies at GEO.
 Noise is the biggest offender whenever I try daisy chaining effects to a power supply. Or using a power supply.
 Also I've had sparks go from one box to another [just me I guess, they were Boss pedals and a Fab Tone]. LOTS of noise when that happened, also I think sparking kind of helped the noise out in general too.
 A good thing to check anyway tho, is...plug all the daisy's in, not the power supply, then test for continuity between negative and positive of the power supply...contiuity there = direct short in the power supply, and must be sorted out before power up.

[smoguzbenjamin]

I parallel all my effects in a daisy-chain way and I don't have a lot of problem with hum and noise. It is a super-regulated PSU butI also keep it away from mains power lines.

[Travis]

Noise here is cause (most likey) by ground loops.  Try a ground lift on every power connection other than the first.  

Grounds should still be connected through patch cords.

[Mark Hammer]

The first task is to verify:
a) what the polarity of each respective adaptor jack is
b) what the typical current consumption of each pedal is

Your supply should be able to easily power all pedals simultaneously.  If not, make a different supply.  Most pedalboards should be able to survive on a half-amp, though since 3-pin regulators come in 100ma and 1A varieties, aim for 1A.

You CAN simply daisy-chain power plugs and have things work.  I've done it myself.  The smart thing to do, though, is to keep pedals from generating line noise and "infecting" each other with clicks or pops by partly or fully decoupling the power leads.  For example, the main power source could feed 5 separate outs via a 10R resistor (use 1/2W to be safe), with each resistor terminated by a 470uf/16v cap to ground.  That will provide enough smoothing that both 60hz hum from a less than perfectly regulated supply will be reduced, and power line noise from individual pedals, will be reduced.  It would not be inappropriate to have each of those 5 outputs to supply two pedals.  The 10R resistor does not limit the current so much that pedal functioning would be impaired.

In general, just about any pedal that can function on either a battery or an external supply will use the outside-pos/inside-neg convention.  The contact  that carries positive from the outside world always has to be the one to push the internal contact for pos from the battery out of the way, and with barrel-type plugs, that has to be the outside contact.  For those pedals that  use ONLY external supplies, either contact may carry positive or negative since nothing has to push anything else out of the way.  For Electro-Harmonix and other pedals that use mini phone plugs, the plug tip carries positive since it is the tip on phone plugs that does the "pushing".