Harley Benton PowerPlant ISO-10AC Pro

Up until now I had just the one large pedal board powered with a Strymon Zuma with an Ojai slaved off it. These provide very clean, quiet power and I'm really happy with them but I wanted to set up another board for trying new stuff out and swapping pedals in and out etc and obviously need a power supply for this. Before forking out for a more expensive solution, I thought I'd try one of these, the specifications look good for my use case and I didn't feel it was a risky choice since I'm sure Thomann's excellent customer service would have been happy to take it back in favour of a more expensive unit had this one not been suitable.

Firstly, although it doesn't contribute to the function at all, I will jsut say that the packaging is very nice and gives an initial good impression. Of course a nicely presented box is worthless in the device doesn't work well but still a nice touch. The power supply itself feels very solid, I'm pretty sure you could drive your band bus over it without it breaking which is always nice. It looks good too though again that is not really important since it won't be visible under a pedal board. In use it is wonderfully boring, just what you need from a power supply, no drama at all. I've had it powering a bunch of higher current digital and some older school analog pedals and I don't hear any odd noises (other than my playing ha ha). There seems to be plenty of power available, plugging devices that recommend a 500mA supply into one of the 250mA outlets just works (not that I recommend doing that long term) and just for 'research' I tried very briefly shorting out one outlet and as expected the indicator LED for that outlet went off to show the fault and once I removed the short it came back on and worked - perfect!

All in all I am quite impressed so far and feel this is very good value for money. I like having the IEC mains connector because I don't like having the rather flimsy wall warts and unlike some other comments here, I don't want an on/off switch on the power supply because it is more to go wrong and there is the potential to accidentally turn it off when playing. Also, I have no issue wit the length, flexibility or connectors on the leads, they seem reasonable quality and it is easy to buy replacements if you really want them. The case does get warm but not hot and I don't see that as an issue. Well worth checking out.

I bought this as an upgrade from my OneSpot daisy chain which could only power 5 pedals. I don't play professionally so I didn't want to spend twice as much for something like a Cioks/OneSpot/Strymon. The HB Powerplant line gets mostly very good reviews, apart from a few outliers, so I thought it deserved a chance.

First impressions: nice packaging, the unit itself looked good and all cables are included. One or two dual daisy chains would have been nice but at least you get one cable for every output. Some edges and corners of the brick are a bit rough/sharp so I guess there is a small chance you could cut yourself, but really nothing to worry about.

Connecting everything: the power cables that connect to your pedals are really not very flexible. Maybe this is less of a problem if you have the brick underneath your board, but if not, they tend to get in the way. They are also all the same length, which isn't bad, but it does mean that you have a lot of excess cable for the pedals closer to the brick. I have it secured to the back (not underside) of my board, with the right angle connectors in the brick, pointing away from the board, and the straight connectors in my pedals. It doesn't look great but it keeps most of the cable mess off the board instead of in between the pedals. I guess I could make it tidier with a lot of zip ties, but I tend to swap pedals in and out pretty often. Or maybe I would have less cable mess if I had a small version of Powerplant and a few daisy chain, but for the price I chose to go for the big one.

I don't know how to test if the outputs are isolated as advertised, but I haven't had any noise that really bothered me. I didn't expect it to be the quietest power suppy out there and I don't mind a bit of noise anyway.

There is more power available than I will ever need, and combined with the switchable voltage on some of the outputs, there is a lot of flexibility.

For home use, there is little reason to get anything else. My only real complaint are the stiff cables, but for now I have no need to change them. It would be less of a problem if I have a proper board where I could fit the power supply underneath.

Overall definitely recommended!