Review: D’Addario XPND Pedal Power Battery Kit

Daydreaming about the perfect pedalboard is a favorite pastime for most guitarists. Cooking up grandiose plans about sculpting the perfect tone is easier than ever thanks to virtual pedalboard builder sites like Pedal Playground or Pedalboard Planner, and big-name pedalboard manufacturers like RockBoard and Temple Audio are in on it as well.

Highfalutin fantasies about elaborate setups with stereo trickery and MIDI switchers usually crash to earth when the unsexy work of wiring everything together gets in the way, and a few stripped bolts, gunky piles of velcro, and mysterious noises in the signal chain are enough to drive any tone purist to trade it all in for a digital modeler and be done with it all forever.

Photograph: Pete Cottell

Soldering your own audio cables is one way to eliminate clutter, but that’s only half the battle when it comes to wiring a pedalboard. Powering your pedals is the other half, and unless you’re an electrical engineer or a maniac who doesn’t mind accidentally frying a $1,500 amp modeler with shoddy wiring, you’re probably in the market for a plug-and-play power solution that’s easy to stash under your board and forget about. Space-saving solutions like daisy chains are subpar due to their typically low amperage and high levels of added noise, rendering them useless if you’re using anything more sophisticated than your garden-variety Boss or Electro-Harmonix dirt pedal. If you’re averse to noise you’ll need a larger, more expensive unit like a Voodoo Lab Pedal Power or Strymon Zuma to power modern amperage-chugging effects like big box reverbs, delays, or multi-effects pedals.

D’Addario is here to save the day with its XPND kit, which offers a customizable daisy-chain-style power supply that gets its juice from a USB-C power bank. The Long Island–based manufacturer is already a household name thanks to its quality guitar strings, and recent dalliances in the pedalboard tech market—most notably the XPND series of adjustable pedalboards—have made quite the splash with guitarists who need quick and reliable options in a space that’s lousy with disposable Temu junk and expensive, over-engineered prosumer gear.

Using all-purpose power banks to power pedals isn’t exactly new, but even the most high-end options falter when they’re tasked with powering hungry digital effects and modelers. None of them offer such a unique twist on the process of chaining one pedal with another.

Cleaner Lines

Photograph: Pete Cottell

The main ingredient in the kit is a black and red power supply cable with eight 9-volt adapters that unscrew at the top. You can loosen the screw to slide the adapters around the cable, or you can unscrew the adapters completely to remove them from the cable and reattach them as needed. This eliminates clumps of extra cable between pedals that are packed in tight, and frees up spare cable to run above, below, and around your board to reach pedals in all places. The cable worked its way across my Temple Audio 24 Duo a total of two times, and the bare cable itself easily slid down below through the perforations in the board to stay out of the way between pedals.

Once everything was spaced out, I attached the adapter by lining up the color-coded sides of the tops alongside the matching side of the cable, screwed them in, and I was good to go. There’s a small removable piece of plastic that guides the top onto the adapter that’s prone to falling out while the top is disconnected, which you’re likely to lose if you’re not careful, but other than that the process of attaching the 9-volt adapters to the power cable is a painless process.

Photograph: Pete Cottell

Any adapter in the chain is then plugged into the 9-volt input on the 2” x 1.5” converter box that’s included in the kit. The other side of the box connects via USB-C (two right-angle cables are included) to the D’Addario-branded power bank, which is durable and about the same size as an iPhone 13 Pro. The name-brand battery is key: I used this setup to power two different chains of pedals, neither of which lit up when I plugged the converter box into a relatively beefy Anker power supply.

The first was a modest rig with six pedals that most gigging musicians would consider to be the bare minimum for good tone: a Jackson Bloom, an Xotic Effects BB Preamp, a Boss Xtortion, an MXR Analog Chorus, a Walrus D1, and a Chase Bliss Dark World. These fired up without fail, and the power bank fed them juice for an average of five hours in five different tests. On two occasions, the power bank's digital gauge, which is bright and easy to read at any angle, abruptly transitioned from 25 percent to dead near the end of the fifth hour. This would annoy me if I was the type of musician who played weddings, cruise ships, or other gigs that spanned multiple hours or genres, but I’m all rig and no gig, so it’s easy enough to take note of and work around. Also of note here is that it took a little less than two hours to charge the power bank up to 100 percent with the USB-C output of an Anker Nano 65-watt wall charger.

The second board was a shoegazer’s wet dream, complete with multiple delays, reverbs, modulations, and whatever the hell you’d call the Chase Bliss Mood v2. In addition to the aforementioned “micro-looper,” I wired up a Walrus M1, Walrus D1, Walrus R1, Boss Space Echo, Boss Loop Station, Strymon El Capistan, Chase Bliss Generation Loss v2, Chase Bliss Dark World, and a Meris Mercury X. The Mood and the Mercury X refused to power up, so I unplugged those and ran a 10-second loop from the Loop Station through the rest of the pedals to see how long this rig would stay alive. Five tests yielded an average run time of about 2.5 hours, which is more than enough time for the garden-variety aging hipster turned worship guitarist to rip off The Edge in service of Him without having to deal with their Strymon Big Sky crapping out.

How’s the Noise?

Photograph: Pete Cottell

Noise is a novel concern with portable power supplies, but the XPND works well with both digital and analog pedals alike. The last item included in the kit is a little converter box that’s supposed to go between your chain and high-draw digital pedals that don’t always play nice with low-draw fuzzes, overdrives, and the like. In my first test rig, I used this box to “isolate” the D1 and the Dark World, which resulted in a terrible screeching sound added to the chain the second I fired it up. I removed the isolator box and it went away. Welp.

I plugged this all into the hi-z input on my Universal Audio Apollo X8, dialed in 30 dB of gain, then A/B’ed the XPND-powered rig against the same rig powered by the isolated outputs of a Strymon Ojai. Relative to the Ojai, the XPND added about 4.5 db of a subtle “pfffffffffff” sound that was barely audible when the guitar was silent, and impossible to make out while I ripped the intro of “Never Meant” on my Telecaster. I then used the clever auto-gain feature on the Apollo to dial in the perfect level of gain, which leveled out around 18 db. This made the noise from the XPND barely audible at all when idle.

I have not played a live gig as a guitarist in 13 years, and I’m not sure the life of a gigging musician will ever be on the horizon. On the off chance that a friend asks me to play midwestern emo covers at their elder millennial barn wedding, I will undoubtedly reach for the XPND to power the handful of pedals I’ll bring along. In the even rarer occasion that I find myself in a shoegaze band with two or three other adult humans I can tolerate enough to deal with at weekly practices, I would absolutely use the XPND to further insulate myself from the sketchy power outlets one would find at the venues we would play, assuming we were lucky enough to get booked in the first place.

For now, the XPND is a handy utility I reach for when I want to assemble a pedalboard quickly without any major wiring headaches. It’s not my go-to choice if I need whisper-quiet guitar tracks with an impossibly low noise floor, but the convenience of powering a pedalboard without plugging into a socket will almost always outweigh the minimal downside of a little bit of hum in the signal.