Members nightraven Posted January 5, 2010 Members Share Posted January 5, 2010 incoming wall of text - please bear with me i'm not sure if it is the pedal or the PSU, but i got my meatball a couple months ago and found it needed the stupid 9v centre positive japanese style adaptor rather than the classic negative tip boss adaptor, so i rushed out to get a power supply for it. i bought a cheap power supply for it because, well, there wasn't an alternative in that little shop. and even though it was unregulated i took it anyway because the meatball can handle up to 12v. anyway, when i got home i fired up the beast and even though the trigger LED was reacting accordingly to my dynamics (telling me that the envelope was working), it didn't make any sound from the effect itself (the dry signal still came through when i rolled the blend knob back, and when i bypassed the pedal of course). i unplugged the PSU from the pedal and then plugged it back in and it worked perfectly and sounded magical like it's supposed to. and then every now and then it has 'off days' where it has the problem i described earlier where it won't sound the filter sweep and i have to unplug and replug the PSU for it to work, and the pedal is incredibly stubborn about it. it was going great in the last month or so with no problems but today it was really unhappy so i'm getting very concerned about it. because it wasn't working the first time i fired it up i'm thinking it's not to do with the power supply because surely even if i pumped 18v into this pedal, it would probably take a lot of these lethal doses to kill it, if my PSU is bad enough in the first place to give off 18v even though it's 9v unregulated. i paid higher than the average price of these pedals to ensure that i'd get a pedal that wasn't broken or had any problems so i really hope it's just a lousy power supply. but today i finally got the bespeco vm18l expression pedal that lovetone suggest you use with this pedal, and it was a real hassle getting it to work. i know with these pedals you have to plug the expression pedal in halfway for it to control the parameters but the pedal wouldn't do anything however deep i plugged it into the spots. it worked once on the wah mode but there was very little sweep going on (even though i had it on lowpass mode+mid boost+colour maxed+sweep off+trigger down+blend max). now would also be a good time to add that the battery snap doesn't work either with this pedal - i thought nothing of it at the time because these pedals supposedly devour batteries incredibly fast and i was going to use a PSU on this all the time anyway, but it's another sign that my meatball isn't quite healthy. so, long wall of text out of the way, does anybody have a clue what's up with my pedal? it sounds like god when it's working, but should i send it to a tech somewhere in holland for a check-up? i don't want to have to do that because i can only think of one tech in holland who's very experienced with pedals and i presume will be up for taking this thing apart, and this guy lives on the other side of the country. thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Mr. Sarum Posted January 5, 2010 Members Share Posted January 5, 2010 Sorry to hear that. I don't have much advice other than take some pic of the inside, focusing in on the jacks and the footswitch and post them for us to see. But other than that I got nothing. But I would recommend sending it to a tech if you can. So here's a bump for ya! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members (⌐■_■) Posted January 5, 2010 Members Share Posted January 5, 2010 TBH its not a complex circuit but the off board wiring is formidable I would pop it open gently on a clean desk and have a look for cold solder joints then its all about getting out the multimeter and signal tracer or blindly replacing components Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members nightraven Posted January 5, 2010 Author Members Share Posted January 5, 2010 i'm a complete beginner at electronics so hopefully you guys will understand that i'm a bit wary about taking apart something as expensive as this here are some pics: http://i159.photobucket.com/albums/t151/nickorly/IMG_1756.jpg http://i159.photobucket.com/albums/t151/nickorly/IMG_1761.jpg http://i159.photobucket.com/albums/t151/nickorly/IMG_1758.jpg http://i159.photobucket.com/albums/t151/nickorly/IMG_1760.jpg i don't really know how to identify any problems here so hopefully the pics are good enough quality. it's a relatively early meatball (1997, pre-dinosaural) thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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