Harley Benton PowerPlant ISO-1AC Pro Modular

I have bought a lot of guitar stuff. From flashy reverbs and delays to OD's, Phasers, wah's you name it. But this thing is one of those things that are just so good and affordable, that I get a big smile on my face whenever I see or think of it. It's silent, has an insane amount of juice, modular (which is a very important aspect since I bought three of these and an ISO-2AC Pro Modulars to power 20 pedals) and it's build like a tank. Also it's a switchmode power supply so you can use it anywhere. You don't get any spare cables but the ones they included feel solid enough to last a very long time. The plugs are also a relatively small form factor. All in all, just get this. Even if you only have 1 pedal. Get rid of wall warts and daisy chains. This is the way to go.

I was seduced by the small package and that it's packing a small punch for its compact size. (500mAh per output). I am powering a small pedalboard with a Boss looper, a midi controller, a tuner + a booster. Nothing too power hungry really. On paper it looked perfect. When I received it, it looked solid and not cheap, so it was another + and I was confident this was it.
But... the only time I used it live, power dropped on me. Briefly. Rendering my RC5 looper useless with an error message, until I unplugged it and plugged it back.
Maybe I got unlucky and the venue's power was inconsistent, making the juice drop for a second and hindered my live performance, but I couldn't take the risk to encounter this again while playing live. The HB powerPlant was the only new piece in my "pedalboard puzzle" and as I never had this before using PSUs, I had to send it back. I could recommend the solidity, the finish, the practicality of the product. All good. But unreliability was now shadowing all this. Unfortunate. I have to go back and keep looking for a more reliable unit.

This provides enough power for modern, high end pedals. And they're all isolated. 500Ma is easily enough to daisy chain more units if required, and if you choose the right pedals to do this with, won't interfere with the sound quality (and of course you buy the extension unit for a few pounds if you want all isolated).

The unit is solid, well made and silent - no interference in my chain. You can plug it directly in to a UK socket with a standard UK IEC kettle lead. And of course you take it all over the world without difficulty. This is a third of the price of any serious competition. It also looks good. Top notch.

Two minor points: 1) normally Thomann throw in an English kettle lead for EU plugged items coming to England - this time they did not. But they are common leads and I had a spare. 2) If you use velcro/onboard fasteners then it's great but if you don't, no rubber feet are provided.

Suffering from noise issues in my setup I had traced down to a combination of an Artec Power Brick introducing extreme amounts of common mode noise, and a long cable run towards my amplifier bleeding that noise into the signal due to imperfect conductance across the shield, I sought to address this by getting shorter cables and a power supply that may inject less noise into my signal chain. The ISO-1AC Pro Modular however suffers from the same ills as many a non-isolated switch-mode pedal power supply, and while very marginally less noisy across the same cable run, it has proven very temperamental, introducing a high pitched whine whenever I interact with the guitar with a mere three analog pedals powered, and not even switched on, running into my amplifier, even when I shorten the final cable run to a mere 0.9m to eliminate most of the remaining common mode noise bleed. The sheer noisiness of the power proves to be a problem when powering anything floating as well, a tuner connected one-way to an isolated line out / fx send injects so much hum into the amplifier you can forget about playing anything. Of course, this will go for any low quality switch-mode power supply, but that particular use-case is even more doomed than with a daisy-chain or negative-linked brick, since in those scenarios at least the device is capable of sharing a ground and bleeding off most of the power supply noise. The isolation of the outputs from each other does the heavy lifting in keeping this power supply from letting pedals ruin each other's day, but if you're in a situation where the pedals aren't disagreeing with each other, and your high-gain amplifier simply disagrees with being connected to a high-noise switch-mode power supply of any kind, then this power supply seems to introduce more problems than it solves.