alkaline yea or na

Add a mains power option to the poll.

I have no pedals more than than 20 years old but they all plug into mains electricity through a transformer or a Boss tuner.

Al Kaline.

Because baseball.

You can dial in the amount of voltage & current sag with this brand new pedal from pGOO Electronix:

Alkalines have roughly twice the capacity of heavy duty batteries. However, a DC supply has roughly infinite times the capacity of an alkaline, though, so that's what I go with.

Yes.  A mini russet with two nails jabbed into it.


The big difference between battery types is how they deliver voltage over their lifetime.  Alkalines supply their rated voltage for a longer period; in voltage-sensitive devices, this makes the difference between proper operation and not working at all.

Well, legend has it that Eddie Van Halen used a variac to lower the voltage to his amps to thicken up the sound, so there's that.

The story I heard was that in the early days when they were playing smaller venues, he wanted to have his Marshall dimed, but felt it was too loud. He tried lowering the voltage with a variac in the hopes that it would drop the volume, but he ended up liking how the lower voltage made the amp sound.

Who knows if it's true or not.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The story Ed told in the Smithsonian interview was he worked all summer delivering pianos to buy a 100-watt Marshall head that came into the music shop where he worked. He was finally able to buy it but it was too loud, and everywhere they played he was told to turn it down. He tried facing it backwards, pointing it at the floor, etc. Nothing worked. He saw a classified ad in the newspaper for another Marshall head and thought "maybe this one will be different". So he went and bought it, and when he brought it home and turned it on it didn't work, but he left it turned on and came back a little while later to try to play through it and sounded incredible "but incredibly quiet". Turns out the voltage was set to 220V and it took a long time for it to warm up at half voltage. He started looking for ways to control the voltage going into the amp so he could get a good sound at low volume. He said he tried hooking the amp up to the light dimmer in the house and blew the power out, so he went to an electronics shop and asked them if they had some kind of variable transformer, and was told "We have something called a Variac". He said the sweet spot for recording was around 89V.

It was an interesting interview, I don't have access you youtube at the moment but it's on there.

A 105V tap - do you mean on the power transformer primary?

If so, then connecting 120V wall voltage to that will INCREASE all the voltages in the amp by about 14%.
That would be bad, as everything will run very hot.

Note that early Marshalls had a 100V speaker output, which is a completely different thing.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant-voltage_speaker_system

I hope it’s obvious that it would be a terrible idea to connect wall voltage to that!

Dropping the mains voltage to the amp by 15% will have a measurable effect. Reducing the voltage to a valve will reduce its anode current, which reduces its gm and so reduces the stage gain. Just a bit, but that will apply to every gain stage along the amp’s signal path, so x4. So a possible net effect of a few dB less max available system gain.

Then the amp’s power output will be directly related to the square of the reduction in the amp’s HT voltage. So about 15% lower HT voltage will lead to the max output power dropping by over 25%. But that’s not even a 1.5dB change, so given the few minutes that will have elapsed in changing the outlet supplying the amp, it indeed would have been surprising if you’d been able to notice such a small change.