What is the deal with 18 volt pedals? Hype?

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DeathJag
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What is the deal with 18 volt pedals? Hype?

Post by DeathJag » Fri Oct 19, 2018 1:54 pm

Several pedals I’ve recently aquired take 9 - 18 volts. Both manuals state the tone will be awesome when using 18 volts.

What the hell is up with that?

Does that mean that any 9 volt pedal in the chain will badly affect the tone?

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Re: What is the deal with 18 volt pedals? Hype?

Post by mackerelmint » Fri Oct 19, 2018 4:16 pm

It just means there's more clean headroom and dynamic range available (in theory) with 18 volt pedals. Whether that's good or not depends on the effect and how well designed it is.

For a fuzz box, it'd be a really dumb gimmick, for example. But whether or not running a pedal that can do both at 9 volts makes your rig sound less good is a matter of what your ears tell you.
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Re: What is the deal with 18 volt pedals? Hype?

Post by DeathJag » Fri Oct 19, 2018 5:04 pm

mackerelmint wrote:
Fri Oct 19, 2018 4:16 pm
It just means there's more clean headroom and dynamic range available (in theory) with 18 volt pedals. Whether that's good or not depends on the effect and how well designed it is.

For a fuzz box, it'd be a really dumb gimmick, for example. But whether or not running a pedal that can do both at 9 volts makes your rig sound less good is a matter of what your ears tell you.
Okay, so that means just having a 9 volt pedal anywhere in the chain will reduce dynamic range. Which is usually fine but I do play with a clean tone (drenched in reverb) so maybe I’ll notice. But the bottom line is, use my ears and be glad that the 9 volt tuner pedal I just got is true bypass?

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Re: What is the deal with 18 volt pedals? Hype?

Post by andy_tchp » Fri Oct 19, 2018 5:22 pm

Nope, that's not how it works. The voltage switch only affects the pedal it's being applied to.

There is no difference to the rest of your chain, there is no 'reduction in dynamic range' or any other detrimental affect from using 9V powered pedals; the overwhelming majority of pedals on the market are 'only' 9V and have been forever.
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Re: What is the deal with 18 volt pedals? Hype?

Post by mackerelmint » Fri Oct 19, 2018 5:52 pm

^^^

What he said. If you want more dynamic range and clean headroom from that/those pedals specifically, run 'em at 18v. It's not like running a 4k video signal through something that has to break it down to 1080p to use it and losing resolution.

But if running them at 9 isn't cramping your style, it may not be worth the trouble. How big a difference it will actually make will vary from pedal to pedal, and it probably doesn't actually matter.
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Re: What is the deal with 18 volt pedals? Hype?

Post by fuzzjunkie » Sat Oct 20, 2018 10:09 am

A lot of fuzz pedals operate at less than 6 volts even with the 9 volt battery. It’s one of the reasons you can leave a battery in a Fuzz Face for quite some time while a chorus pedal seems to burn through them.

A delay or pitch shift pedal might need some higher headroom to perform properly, but a Fuzz certainly doesn’t. Some will even sound better when the battery runs down and the voltage gets “starved” and some players look for run down batteries or pedals with a “starve” function. Again, this doesn’t affect any pedals before or after, but it’s mostly pedals with multiple ICs that need the extra voltage for optimum performance.

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Re: What is the deal with 18 volt pedals? Hype?

Post by DeathJag » Sat Oct 20, 2018 4:22 pm

Thanks for all the info! I used two 9 volt pedals in front of one 18 volt pedal and it seemed actually a little noisier. But that was not at a practice nor recorded so there’s really no way to measure. It was probably my imagination.

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Re: What is the deal with 18 volt pedals? Hype?

Post by thedude99 » Sat Oct 20, 2018 4:48 pm

I run my Fulldrive 2 at 18 volts and it sounds incredible.

It was a happy accident. I bought an new power supply and had to make use of the 18v plug with something, and the Fulldrive won.

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Re: What is the deal with 18 volt pedals? Hype?

Post by oid » Sat Oct 20, 2018 5:14 pm

18Volt is great for pedals that you want to remain clean no matter what, they can swallow the full output of any 9 volt pedal before it without clipping which can be good from a gain staging/noise standpoint and they can output twice the voltage, which is great if you want to really slam the input of a 9Volt pedal or amp. Beyond this it is just a marketing point and you can let your ears decide.

Edit: They can output twice the voltage assuming there is not some sort of fixed clipping element such as most uses of diodes, output will be the same in most such cases, the OCD and its spawn being an exception since the diodes are biased and the bias voltage goes up with the supply voltage.
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Re: What is the deal with 18 volt pedals? Hype?

Post by pj » Wed Nov 28, 2018 2:32 am

I have tried some pedals both ways and I like delays better at 18 volts but not compressors or dirt boxes. Experiment and see what works. Just make sure your pedals are rated for the extra voltage so they don't get fried.

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