What’s the Amperage on the Memory Boy?

If you’re reading this post, I’m pretty sure you’re curious about the power consumption of your Memory Boy. Believe it or not, it’s not as crazy as it seems!

When I first got my unit, I experienced a terrible thing. I plugged in the adaptor into the pedal and then to the power outlet and… well nothing worked. A couple of minutes later, I realized I fried the pedal for two reasons:

I’ve used the wrong power supply. To my excuse ;), I have to say this was not my fault. I’ve received the pedal as a present and the person who bought it did that overseas (Canada to be precise). My best guess is that the store clerk misplaced the Memory Boy’s AC adapter with the Memory Man’s AC adapter. This was later confirmed by the technician who repaired my pedal saying that I’ve used a 24V DC instead of a 9V DC adapter.
I forgot the power wall was 220V instead of 120V for my home country. This one was totally my fault. My best -and only- defense is that I was too excited to try my new pedal and completely overlooked this aspect. This is a classic issue that arises especially when someone buys or gets electronics from North America.

EHX Memory Boy with a Boss DD-7 — **Image 1:** My Memory Boy alive and kickin’ next to the DD-7.

Having this experience helped me to pay more attention to certain details, and be more careful whenever I had to try new equipment. It also allowed me to understand a little better certain aspects of pedal power consumption and that’s what I’m going to share with you on this brief article.

First, Some Definitions

Before jumping straight into the power consumption (and related aspects) of the Memory Boy, I think it’s a good idea to first clarify certain terms. This will come in handy not only to understand the functioning of this pedal but of also other gear in general. Without further due, here they are:

Current: I understand current as a term we use to express or visualize running electricity. I might be wrong but for the purposes of this article, I think it should be fine :).

Draw/Drawing: It has nothing to do with art, that much I can already tell you! This term means consumption because typically you use or draw a resource which in this case, electricity. When people say that something is drawing current, they mean that this device is using power from some kind of source (a battery, and adapter, etc.).

Ampere: An ampere is just a base unit of electric current. It is standard unit used worldwide and its name derives from a French mathematician named André-Marie Ampère, which is considered the father of electrodynamics. Often times this word is shortened as “amp”, which should not be confused with the short version of the word “amplifier”.

Amperage: Now that we have the base unit, we can proceed and define this term. Amperage simply means the strength of the electric current and it is measured by amperes.

Milliamperes (mA): This is likely a term you’ve encountered before in your pedals. Imagine you multiply an Ampere by 1000, what do you get? Exactly! You get a milliampere or stated shortly, mA. This is the preferred term used most times for electronic devices because their power consumption is not big enough to conveniently express it in normal Amperes. For instance, 0.2 amperes will be 200mA.

With these basic concepts in mind, let’s dive into its power consumption.

The Amperage (Power Consumption) of the Memory Boy

If you got this pedal brand new, you will get a simple yet informative instruction manual where it will state that this delay uses 45mA or 0,045 Amperes. It will also say that you should just use the 9V DC adaptor provided to get that.

Memory Boy's Amperage — **Image 2**: Screenshot from the instruction manual of the MB. A link to the pdf is provided in the Resource section.

As a second option, the Memory Boy has a battery clip inside the pedal that you can access provided you first unscrew the bottom panel (not very convenient to be honest). It will accept the classic square 9V batteries and if I’m not mistaken, new units also come with one inside.

Just so you have a better idea of the consumption of the pedal, let’s compare it with some other devices. The Deluxe Memory Man, for instance, uses a 24V DC adaptor and consumes 100mA. The Deluxe Memory Boy uses a 9V DC adaptor, but it also consumes 100mA. How about some BOSS pedals? Believe it or not, a big pedal like the DD-20 runs on a 9VDC adaptor and also consumes 100mA. However, a more modern delay like the TimeLine, even though it runs on 9V DC, needs 300mA, a little more than 6 times the consumption of the Memory Boy.

Batteries or Power Supply?

The answer here is very simple: in the long run, you need a power supply in order to not spend a fortune on 9 Volt alkaline batteries. As stated before, this pedal can run with the aforementioned option, but accessing the clip is not very convenient due to the unscrewing process. Nonetheless, I would like to share my experience with both, running the pedal on batteries and with a power supply.

Running the Pedal on Batteries

I remember running this pedal at least 6 months without a power supply. Just so you have an idea, a classic Duracell 9V square battery (the Coppertop one) has a power supply of 310 mA per hour (mAH). So, for a pedal like the Memory Boy that consumes 45mA, this means that in theory, someone can get at least 6 hours of usage.

In my experience, I have to say I’ve got fewer hours for every single new battery; something between 4 and 5 (relatively close to what’s stated on the manual). I’ve also used some rechargeable batteries and the results were around 3 to 4 hours of usage, sometimes a little bit more depending on how long the batteries where left charging.

Running the Pedal with a Power Supply

It was obvious that after some time and for the usage I was having for this pedal a power supply was the way to go. Because I didn’t have the original one, I was forced to look to some alternatives. I went to my local music store and picked a Behringer PSU-SB which was basically the cheap version of a BOSS power supply.

The Behringer PSU worked perfectly with my pedal and solved the issue of being dependant on batteries to run the show.

Some Things to Consider

I do have to say something. A few months after I started running my Memory Boy with the independent power supply I was already playing with 4 pedals. By that time a friend of mine gave me a monster 2.000mA makeshift power supply “brick” so I could have all my pedals working with just one power source.

I was really grateful for his present but having a too much power made my pedal a little awkward I would guess, and it did make some noise while engaged. It wasn’t very noticeable, but it was there. So, often times I would just run my three other pedals with the 2.000mA brick power supply and my Memory Boy isolated with the Behringer PSU.

But that changed when my wife (back then my girlfriend ;)) gave me a Visual Sound 1 Spot as a present. This daisy-chain power supply generates 1.700mA and that was more than enough for my pedals. As a big plus, it didn’t make any noise with the Memory Boy; that right there was pure gold.

Different Power Sources, Different Sounds

As a final observation, I’m compelled to mention that the sound generated from the 9V batteries and the power supply was to some extent different. I’m also inclined to say that the sound produced by the pedal with the batteries were a little bit more “warm”.

My best guess is that this was caused by the attrition of the power being generated (especially during the last phases of usage). This may have caused the pedal to respond a little bit differently when less and less power was being poured into the device.

But as I said before, that’s just my guess and my personal impression. Please comment below if you’ve experienced something similar (or different) with this pedal and which sound do you prefer the most.

List of Countries and AC Current

So you don’t make the same mistake as I did, I’ll put on the resources section a link to with the complete list of countries and their respective voltage use (whether is 110/120V or 220V).

But in essence, here’s the big picture:

North America: 120V and 60Hz.
Central America: 120V and 60Hz.
Oceania: 220V and 50Hz.
Asia: 220V and 50Hz
- (Japan is the big exception here, they use something like 110V and 50Hz).
Europe (most of it): 220V and 50Hz.
Africa (most of it): 220V and 50Hz.
South America: Half of it uses 220V and 50Hz and the other half uses 110/120v and 60Hz.

Some Final Thoughts

I’m grateful that the technician could solve my pedal problems. He told the had to use some old computer boards to find the spare parts that have been fried up, but it worked!

After the incident, I’ve checked a lot of YouTube demos to find out if my pedal was working the “right” way, and at least I couldn’t find any noticeable differences between my Memory Boy and the others being reviewed. That was a big relief.

The main idea of this post was to just show you some things to consider every time you buy a new pedal (especially if it is a used one) and to pay attention to those silly details. I hope you’ve found the information provided here useful and as always, I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences on pedal power consumption, your best solutions, problems, awkward experiences, and so on :).

Until the next time,

M.M