I am using a Visual Sound 1 Spot power supply to power my pedal board. Every time I plug in my BOSS RC-2 to the power supply I get a hum. If I power the RC-2 with a battery the hum goes away. I have tried all types of power chaining configurations with no success.
Is there a ground issue going on with the RC-2 that can be corrected? Or do I need to step it up to a Voodoo Lab Pedal Power to resolve this problem?.
The hum you are hearing is probably the alternating current from the mains adapter. The reason there is no hum with the battery is because batteries are direct current, and have no oscillations in the current.
My suggestion would be to move the pedals away from the mains plug, or anything large and metal (laptops, televisions, radiators). Or you could try plugging the line out from the pedal board into a DI Box, and then into the amp. DI boxes are fairly cheap, with decent ones being as low as £20-30. Here is a Behringer one.
If that fails, try changing cables. Bad cables can be the source of unwanted noise.
Hope this helps
What you are hearing also could be a ground loop. Daisy chain power adapters suffer from this issue because the ground line on every pedal is shared. Not all pedals isolate their grounds appropriately so you will hear a little hum, which may get worse as you add more pedals to the chain. This is a reason why certain power supplies tout "isolated grounds" as a feature on their units. I highly recommend powering your pedals with one of these units. Despite their moderate expense, the benefits of a power supply such as this outweigh the shortcomings greatly.
