Hi,

I got what I was told (and looks like) a fairly new English Muff’n pedal as a trade with somebody. It has some issues that I dont think are normal, but there is no way for me to check. As there are no shops near me which sell them.

The power supply is VERY noisy, it buzzes like a bee and only gets worse the longer you keep it on. Is this normal?

Secondly, the power supply rattles. The transformer block inside doesnt seem to be attached to anything, so it rattles about. Is this normal?

Thirdly, actual sound of the pedal is strangely “fizzy”. The pedal is extremely microphonic, even at low volume. It turns everything including the guitar into a microphone. Even a strong breath is picked up, but comes through the pedal as a strange whiny fizzy sound. This is even with very low gain setting.

Any light touch of the strings, with palm muting for example, with very low gain. Through a regular amp/pedal would come out as a soft clean bass sound. But again this sets off an intense high gain fizz which I can only liken to a cheap musical toy synth that is running out of juice. When playing through with a rather clean setting, you can hear this fizz in the background with the clean sound on top. Its like two guitars are playing at once, one high gain fizzy fuzz and the other clean.

The pedal sounds the best on a higher gain setting as its harder to notice this bizzarre fizz underneath, the standard 12ay7 didnt put out enough gain to cover it up plus sucked out a lot of tone/clarity, I just put some new 12ax7’s in it (also EH brand), which has increased the gain dramatically. Now I cant get a cleanish sound even with the gain on 0, but need it about 12’o’clock to cover the fizz. The tone is better now though.

Could all these issues be down to the power supply?

I have a lot of spare power supplies for things around the home, would I be correct in thinking I can use anything that is 12v 1000ma and has the right polarity?