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So my beloved Sabbra Caddabra has never been the quietest of pedals, but until the last couple days it's never been a problem. Lately, however, it's started to sound like this:

http://soundcloud.com/user-913509462/sabbra-noise

Which is significantly louder than usual. In this clip, it's running off my Snark daisy chain, which is how I always run it. The noise is there regardless of what or how many other pedals are in the chain, though I haven't tried it running off a 9V yet.

One thing that has happened is that a week or so ago, the plug from the Snark slipped or was knocked out, and sparked pretty heavily as it hit the edge of the input. Could that be the culprit here? And if so, what can be done? Actually, if not, what can be done continues to be the question.

Thanks in advance for any ideas you might have!

My Sabbra was just too noisy period. I sold it.

shikawkee wrote:My Sabbra was just too noisy period. I sold it.

Like I said, mine hasn't been this noisy until recently. Did yours sound like the clip I posted?

Yup. Mine was horrible from the get go. Couldn't deal with it so I sold it to one of the Doomer's at Southern Lord <g>.

Try it with a battery. If it's quiet there, maybe something happened to your pedal's power filtering.

3205 wrote:Try it with a battery. If it's quiet there, maybe something happened to your pedal's power filtering.

Thanks! That's my agenda for after work. I don't know shit about pedals; if that is the case, is the kind of thing that's easily fixed (by someone who knows what they're doing)?

Is it the background whine? I find that's usually power supply related, sometimes SMPS will shift the range at which the switching occurs in relation to the load for efficiency purposes. It's possible that the spark event "adjusted" some component in the filtering section and the switching controller has adjusted frequency to compensate.

It might not be as bothersome on other pedals because they've got better common mode rejection, so, I'd try both batteries and a new PSU before worrying about anything on the pedal side of things.

Mine was actually noisier than yours. It was just too much. It's a great pedal but it was overwhelming in my rig at the time. Definitely couldn't be used in tandem with compression.

crochambeau wrote:Is it the background whine? I find that's usually power supply related, sometimes SMPS will shift the range at which the switching occurs in relation to the load for efficiency purposes. It's possible that the spark event "adjusted" some component in the filtering section and the switching controller has adjusted frequency to compensate.

It might not be as bothersome on other pedals because they've got better common mode rejection, so, I'd try both batteries and a new PSU before worrying about anything on the pedal side of things.

If by "whine" you mean what sounds to me like kind of a quiet roar and starts at like 2 seconds into the clip, then yeah, that. I'll try the battery and see what else I can come up with, then report back. Thanks!

UPDATE: Tried it with the last (dying) 9V in the house. Before the juice got sucked away entirely, the pedal was in fact almost perfectly quiet. Relatively speaking.

UPDATED UPDATE: Also it is fine with its own (i.e., not daisy chained) 9V adapter!

So... other than "always run it off a battery/isolated power supply" is there anything that can be done about this?

Have someone knowledgeable take a look at the power filtering - might just need a new cap somewhere.

3205 wrote:Have someone knowledgeable take a look at the power filtering - might just need a new cap somewhere.

Cool thanks!

My buddy has a Sabbra and he's had the same problems. If it's anything like some other Catalinbread pedals I've studied, everything is crammed real tight inside and caps may have gotten dented etc..