Truetone VS 1 Spot Combo Pack

The world of pedals is daunting enough when you first start out, but when you get to power supplies, then it's terrifying. Needless to say I'm a beginner to the world of pedals.

I wanted something to power my small pedal collection (6 pedals), as my battery costs were getting way too expensive. I noted from endless forums and videos online, that hum and noise can cause an issue when power supplies are involved. Isolated supplies were apparently the way to go and daisy chains were a big no.

Being on a budget, a quality isolated power supply was out of the question and so I asked a friend who I knew had a 1-Spot and used live, if it worked well for him. He said it did and had never experienced hum or noise with it.

I took a gamble and purchased the 1-Spot, with the idea to upgrade in time.

I've been playing through the 1-Spot and haven't experienced any problems, it's quiet and powers everything, great. The additional extensions and adaptors are fantastic as it lets me power up my old Big Muff and it feels like it will be long enough to reach any far, distant stage power in the future.

That being said, I'm yet to try this out on stage but I'm confident that I've made the right choice.

If you need something simple, cheap and uncomplicated that doesn't take up a large chunk of room on your board then the 1-Spot is excellent. No more battery worries!

The main reason for this product was off course to elimante several adapters on my pedalboard. I don´t run a great deal of pedals, but there is a handful of them there, including a Line6 M5 Stomp Modeler. The thing that I really felt was great was that this combo adapter supported the Line6 M5 (needs more power), but it didn´t work quite that good in reality.
Running my other pedals (TC-reverb, an OD, WhaWha, Tuner) works like a charm, but as soon as the M5 gets in the mix the chain starts to hum, and it´s really enoying. So the Visual Sound will stay for all the other pedals, but the M5 will still have it´s original adapter.

So for me it is ok, but not great.

These units are great and can make for a very small and convenient set up -especially if you have a smallish pedalboard. There is more than enough power for everything, and you can even join several daisy chain leads together to power even more things should your pedal board be huge! The only negatives are that you can't power reverse polarity pedals at the same time as 'normal' centre negative pedals -even if you switch the polarity for one of the outputs the others won't work. Also some pedals like to have their own separate power supply and will create a humming noise (even if otherwise they appear to be working correctly). It's mainly power hungry digital pedals that create these noise problems, but for analog and certain digital pedals there is no problem. It really is on a case by case basis, so experimenting will yield the best results. Some people do not like these 'switching type' power supplies and will recommend individually isolated power supplies (like Voodoo Lab's Pedal Power 2) but in my experience of having both types: as long as you don't encounter a noisy pedal as described above, these 1 Spot solutions can be every bit as good, more practical and a great deal cheaper!

Checking the mAmp requirements of my pedals, I realised that having a isolated brick style power supply might be unnecessary. So I ordered this to try it out.

Powers things really well, nice long cable, no noise, very happy with it.

The daisychain works great and is well made but the plugs are way too big.

My pedalboard is a particular size that allows me just enough for a second row of pedals, if I mix and match them just right.

However these daisychain plugs stick out so much I had to shuffle things around, and didn't like that. It meant things got a bit messy too.

For many people with the newer Pedaltrain/rail-style boards this probably won't be an issue. Just something to be aware of.

Very happy with the power supply though.

After way too long of using batteries to power pedals.. I finally invested in the visual sounds or "Truetone" 1 spot power supply. If i had more funds i probably would have invested in one of the Walrus Audio Phoenix power supply bricks or the Voodoo lab power supply, but for the price you couldn't really go wrong here. I have read some previous reports of noise from this unit but I find mine fairly silent and that is when using it to power 8 pedals. There is a good chance that in the next two years I will update to an isolated power supply, but this is so far exceeding my expectations.

I bought my first combo pack without knowing what it trully is. Was really happy I could power my all 3 pedals at the time, no questions asked.. At some point I got a used digitech pds 20/20, and when it arrived at my place I was terrified, I had to find a way to power it.. Truetone combo was there for me though!!

Now, almost a year later, and many pedals later, I got another one. If Nathan Latona from Tera Melos can power his 2 boards with just these, it will work for me as well! Yeah, no isolated outputs or anything, but who cares? :) If there's any noise, its not the power supply's fault. It's the pedals fault, or it's not a fault at all.. Learn to love it.