Hello, it’s me again ! I grabbed an Alesis Microverb 3 for € 9 including shipping. It needs 9V AC. OF COURSE I have NO power supply with 9V AC only one with 15V AC. So I unscrewed the Microverb and found 3 voltage regulators. 1x 7812CT, 1x 7912 CT and 1x 7805CT. According to the data sheets, the 7912CT and 7805CT should handle max 18V and the 7812CT up to 30V. Did I understand that correctly? And maybe someone also has the device and operates it with a higher voltage?
The larger the voltage you put in the more the regulators have to dissipate as heat. They can take the voltage electrically but will they get too hot? That’ll depend on heat sinking and other factors.
I looked on eBay and they’re selling third party 9vac adapters for about £10 with free postage, estimated delivery about a week. Just search for Alesis Microverb 3 and they should show up.
I think that’s the best way to get this toy to a playable condition. But since it was sold for just €9 and you haven’t got a power supply, how confident are you that it’s in working condition? I also find it very hard to believe that you can’t get a better DSP reverb from the average modern laptop.
Of course I’ll buy a suitable power supply next month when I have enough money again. That shouldn’t be a permanent solution, I’d just like to try it out, it’s been here for almost a week now and I can’t play with it :).
Of course I can create an effect like this with my laptop, but I just want to get away from the laptop. By the way, I’m very happy right now, last week I received the microverb and a flanger pedal from Behringer along with shipping for € 18. And from 2 very nice users from another forum I got a Roland A-49, a Presonus audio interface and, now hold on tight, an Arturia MicroBrute GIFT !!! I didn’t even have to pay shipping costs. They said it wasn’t used and was either dusty or thrown in the trash. Crazy, right ?
I’m as happy as a little boy because I don’t have any money yet and otherwise I would never have been able to afford something like that.
Sounds risky, as noted above. 15 V AC is +70% of the specified value, which is more than enough to fry something designed for maybe ±20% (in theory, the regulators should shut down before taking heat damage, but not sure I’d rely on that).
According to the data sheets, the 7912CT and 7805CT should handle max 18V and the 7812CT up to 30V.
The V AC is an RMS value, and the exact output voltage from the wall-wart depends on load, so the internal DC will be in the order of 1.5× before it gets to the regulators, which is more than 18 V (but pretty sure both 78xx and 79xx can handle more than 18 V though, they’re usually speced for 30-35 V).
Be patient and get a proper supply. I like the microverb. I had one in my first rig. It’s no frills, no menu, knobs only function suited me. (I’ve heard you can mod some of the knobs too. - I’ve never seen it though)
The reverb is 90‘s but has a great range and the chorus (my go to for ages) is very playable.
With a power supply I’ve never seen them below £70, working or no but many times Ive seen "untested " when just the power supply is missing.
Take the time to find the service and user manuals. And then while away the no-funds cycle (been there) researching creative uses and mods to build your love for the box.
Then when you have a supply you can suck the marrow out of your jammy bargain.
Thanks guys! You are right, I prefer to wait until next month even if it is difficult to be patient. I hardly have any money anyway and it would be a shame if the device broke because of my impatience! I know it works, but there are a few quirks in some settings. The nice man who sold it to me said sometimes the algorithm is crazy. Whatever I should think of by that. Sounds interesting though. Of course, I immediately looked for mods online. And I also saw 2 pictures of modded devices. I saved a link somewhere, but I can’t find it at the moment. It looked promising.
I occasionally see that term flanger but I just now looked it up on Wikipedia. Oh that’s an old memory to me. When I was a kid I used to play with splicing tape. Listening to a BBC broadcast of a talk by George Martin inspired me to do a little experimentation. I realized I could do something George Martin called “automatic double tracking” by putting thick card in front of the erase head of my father’s reel-to-reel and recording the same piece from my cassette recorder twice onto the same tape with the second recording a fraction of a second after the first, by physically displacing the start point of the second recording. I think that’s got a different name now but the technique was relatively new when George Martin discussed it. I suppose this was the Abbey Road Studios name for it.
I recorded one piece to cassette straight from the television, nothing fancy, just microphone to speaker in a quiet living room. There was speech and weapon effects and running. The effect I got from double tracking the running sound was most interesting. When two characters were running through an echoey tunnel there was this metallic reverberation that swooped a bit like the Doppler from a jet flying overhead. I had independently produced a flanging effect by mixing together two variable echoes. Only I didn’t know what to call it until a couple of hours ago. There are more direct ways to get the same result but that’s how I got it on that occasion. After that I put my toys away and concentrated on academic study, so my time as an amateur sound engineer ended.
I was fifteen before I realised not all books were either library books or thumpingly expensive hardbacks. We were very poor. Ivor Cutler’s monologues resonate well with me. I just happened to catch George on BBC Radio 4 or maybe Radio 3. I came away wanting to build a Leslie speaker like the one he used on Tomorrow Never Knows.
Another talk I remember was by the Scottish composer Thea Musgrave, who discussed electronic music, and played examples of everything from musique concrète to early Moog pieces like Switched On Bach. Along with the Everyman edition of Imogen Holst’s introduction to music (from the lending library) those two talks are my earliest memories of a serious interest in making noises for fun.
I still have my original Imogene Holst rudiments and theory of music. Tried music concrète with an old wire recorder my grandfather gave me but the wire was a bugger to solder so I used an Atari ST.
It’s the latest “WTF Behringer?” meme. People take the Behringer Swing (a new clone of the Keystep) and rebadge it with ever more improbable brand symbols. Say hello to the new Sinclair Specstep.
