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Review: Ernie Ball Volt

A pocket-sized pedalboard power solution from the king of strings.

Ernie Ball Volt
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Review Overview

Our rating

9

Our verdict

Smaller than a packet of strings, this easy-to-use unit delivers great results.

There are few sights as joyful to the modern guitar player as a perfectly organised pedalboard. Exotic boxes shining like the counter at Tiffany & Co, multi-coloured LEDs twinkling… it’s breathtaking. However, feeding your precious collection of effects with a reliable source of electricity can present challenges.

Some isolated power supplies can be bulky and heavy, while their daisy chain-style equivalents are susceptible to extraneous noise and breakage with heavy use. Enter strings and accessory magnate Ernie Ball with the Volt, a new isolated, high-current DC power supply that’s compact, simple to use and highly affordable.

Ernie Ball Volt

In use

There are three things you should know about the Volt. Firstly, it’s minuscule by power-supply standards and will fit snuggly underneath a Pedaltrain Nano or similar pint-sized board, where it will happily feed up to five pedals with 300mA of goodness via the supplied cables. Each output is electronically isolated from the input and other outputs and comes with an LED indicator to let you know that everything is functioning as it should.

Secondly, while the four main outlets are rated at nine volts, the Thru output adjacent to the input can either supply 18 volts to any standalone pedal that can handle it, or be used to power additional Volt units as a solution for larger pedalboards. The Volt will also work worldwide and comes with a selection of lovely prongs that will suit any plug socket from Bognor Regis to Beijing.

Finally, and we can’t stress this strongly enough, the Volt simply works very well indeed. We assembled a group of our most irritable stompboxes, notoriously fussy vintage and boutique numbers alike, and the Volt tamed the lot of them, where other power supplies had sometimes failed. No noise, no fuss. Heaven.

Ernie Ball Volt

Key Features

  • PRICE £119
  • DESCRIPTION Isolated high-current DC power supply, made in China
  • FEATURES 4x 300mA 9v DC centre-negative power outputs. Thru circuit passes 18v from the supplied universal AC adapter and can be used to daisychain multiple Volts. 5x 500mm straight/angled power cables included
  • DIMENSIONS 89 x 58 x 24mm
  • WEIGHT 0.25kg/8.8oz
  • CONTACT ernieball.co.uk

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