foreign [Music] distribution box that's what the SPD one is it is a box into which you can plug multiple power sources batteries or other AC sources that convert to DC and then from there you can power everything in your sound bag or on your small sound card so let's talk about this in more particular terms why does it matter why would you ever want something like this well the thing that it does that's really helpful are a few number one it can take power from multiple sources so it can has two four pin inputs so you can plug in two separate Batteries Plus it has a USBC input where you can bring in another power source so what that allows you to do is that you can hot swap so if one of the batteries is running low you can change that one out even if you're mid take if you're still recording and so you can power basically all day so it gives you some redundancy there and some safety in terms of continuous power throughout the entire day it also has two separate power groups what that means in Practical terms two separate switches locking toggle switches so you can't accidentally turn them on or off first of all but secondly you can power down all of your auxiliary things the things that you don't need for maybe some part of the day but keep your primary recorder still running so the way this works is you would presumably plug in all of your wireless into group number two and your recorder into group number one that way if you're doing some pickup shots with a boom mic and you don't need the wireless for a period of time you can turn off the wireless and save all that battery power with the spd1 in particular you can closely monitor the battery data if your battery support

Telemetry if there are smart batteries and in fact a lot of us are using smart batteries for our sound bags at this point these are the high Q or the inspired energy style batteries and they provide Telemetry for voltage the amount of current that's currently being drawn battery temperature and even the number of recharge Cycles so you understand how old this particular battery is which is also probably going to tell you a little bit about how quickly it discharges or you need to recharge the battery temp is important especially if you're working in really cold environments or really hot environments that will also affect battery life and then of course you want to make sure the voltage is right it gives you that information and also it gives you a sense for how much current your devices are drawing so you can have a pretty good idea of how quickly they're going to drain those batteries so to get a little bit more detail let's talk about what I see as kind of some of the strengths of the SPD one first of all it allows you to connect three power sources and two of those are four pin inputs and then also a USBC input now for the USBC input I would be careful it's it's not going to be all USB battery banks that are going to be able to power that so you'll want to take a look at the deities spd1 manual just to make sure that you have a battery or that you get a battery that will work for this particular setup now of course there's as I mentioned you can hot swap batteries so if you have say two batteries to those four pin inputs and one of them is running low you just pop it off pop a new one in and you're in a good spot it continues to power the devices that you have connected assuming that you're not drawing so much current that a single battery can't support it so there's still some things you have to think about but for most of us that's going to be just fine now of course the box then has six outputs on the back that allow you to take the power from those batteries from the spd1 and send it to your different devices so for example in my case I have a cable that goes over to my sound devices 888 recorder and then also Powers the wireless that I have attached to it these outputs are unregulated meaning that they'll draw as much current as they need and they're on two separate groups as I mentioned before the first group has two outputs and the second group has four outputs as I mentioned before the switches are really nice they are locking so to turn them on or off you have to pull them out to some stand and then you can turn them on or off from there so really nice feature now for each of the batteries that do provide Telemetry data you'll be able to see the battery temperature the voltage again the current or amperage and the cycle count how many times it's been recharged and so the reason that's important is that if you're using something that's been chart recharged 500 times that means that its ability to hold a charge for the same amount of time that a new battery would is is diminished pretty significantly so it's probably going to run out a little bit faster the spd-1 does provide over voltage protection so its operating range is 12 to 18 volts and the over voltage cutoff kicks in at 18 volts and the under voltage kicks in at 7 volts you also have front access to a 5 Volt 2

Amp USB a port so if you need to charge your phone or something like that that's a possibility there a lot of us need to use either phones or tablets to operate some of our equipment so it's nice to have that on the front as well the Box does have a metal housing and we did some EMF testing here didn't notice anything major over at the vents there's a tiny bit of EMF that comes out but nothing that seemed to affect our recording or mess with the cleanliness of our recordings for RF tests we did power up five different wireless microphone transmitters plus a comtech ifb at the same time in close range to the Box itself and didn't seem to pick up any sort of RF interference so things seem really clean there it does have a 1.1 inch color screen that gives you all this Telemetry data again the Locking toggle switches dual quarter inch threaded mounts on the top and bottom and a reversible mounting clip so just be a little bit careful when you're changing that out the housing is aluminum I did scratch it a little bit when I was trying to get that mounting clip in but it works great it is priced at 269 dollars US for the Box itself and it does come with one of the battery cups and then all of the other cables you buy separately and there are a variety of different cables available as

I mentioned there's the battery cut for the inspired energy or high Q style intelligent batteries there is also this one that's interesting this is a essentially I think a ground lift so what this does is this is going to be for more consumer oriented Wireless kits that have grounding issues and a lot of those do actually so this will filter that out in essence there's also this interesting cable here that has three

USBC outputs which can be really useful for powering Wireless transmitters it can take a USBC input of course there are more common cables like for example this is a four pin to four pin Orosi just use those a lot and then there's also four pin to DC Barrel cable series of those in any case we'll put a link to the deity site where you can see all the different cables that are available which should work for for pretty much any device in your sound bag now a few notes Here number one the four pin to three USB connectors cable is not really made for powering recorders like a mix pre or a zoom F6 just so you're aware it won't supply enough power for those to be fully powered in other words the mix pre-3 I could get it to turn on using this but it was in that low power mode where you can only record with I can't remember all the details but I don't think you can use phantom power so on and so forth so I'd love to see a new cable from deity that allows you to power maybe a zoom F6 or a mixed pre that'd be pretty cool and then finally as far as I can tell there's no sort of individual output filtering so if you are getting any sort of ground issues you'll want to use the little ground lift box for the particular device it's having the ground issues all right so overall the SPD one looks like a nice battery distribution box and what I'm going to do is I haven't done thorough thorough testing this is a relatively new one to me I've had it for a couple of weeks what I will promise is I'll go ahead and continue to use it and if I encounter any issues I will put that in a comment down below pinned to the top and give you an update as time goes on hope that was helpful for you if you have any questions go ahead and leave those down below and if you've not already subscribed make sure you do that and we'll be sure to get you more great videos on how to improve your Lighting and Sound for video talk to you soon foreign [Music]