I wouldn’t go as far as to say really rare. Uncommon but far too common to rely on it as a rule.
While we are on the subject of electronics YouTubers, if you want to step it up a bit try DiodesGoneWild. A Czech guy with an absolute gift for explaining things, a subtle but chuckle worthy sense of humour, a very cute cat, and far crazier than Clive or Electroboom. Clive just talks about being crazy. Electroboom is mostly staged. Meanwhile DGW is actually creating 6ft arcs in his bathroom and operating a torn down induction cooktop live on his bench at 240v.
He’s probably not getting his security deposit back.
Oh, man, back in the day, replacing batts in FX pedals was a major bite in the butt. There wasn’t any plastic hatch, you had to take off a plate or the entire base with a (non-jeweller’s) screwdriver and hope you didn’t strip any of the screws taking them out or putting them back. Definitely not a gig-friendly procedure.
If that’s what you’re looking for, Photonicinduction just started posting videos again.
Every time I watch one of his videos, I can’t get over the narration. He’s got a really odd way of talking. It’s like an ultra-polite Alex DeLarge.
Staged, yes. My point was that they’re real. Staged, but real.
There’s usually no inherent reason to favor positive or negative in any particular position. It can matter which side is hot, but that’s a different matter than which one is higher.
That is to say, you could have a system at 0 volts on the outside and +9 volts on the inside, or one at 0 outside, -9 inside, or +9 outside, 0 inside, or -9 outside, 0 inside. Or, in fact, any other pair of numbers with a difference of 9, like -4 and 5, or 1,000,000 and 1,000,009. There are reasons to favor the outside being at 0 (it’s usually safer that way), but whether the inside is above or below that is mostly irrelevant (it might matter to the device, but only because the device is designed for that particular configuration, and if you ask why it was designed that way, the answer will probably be “it just is”).
The one exception to this would be when batteries are involved. The positive and negative terminals of a battery are associated with different chemicals, and there might be reasons why you want one of those chemicals to be tucked away inside the battery, and that can in turn have implications for other aspects of the design.
Not very wasteful. It adds some cost, to be sure, but the trend for the past few decades seems to be towards making devices more tolerant of different sorts of input. Or at least, trying to: Some variations are easier to tolerate than others, and some devices are easier to make tolerant than others.
A series diode certainly provides polarity protection, but there are two penalties: a voltage penalty and a power penalty. The voltage drop across the diode will be around 0.7 V, and the power dissipated by the diode will be 0.7 V multiplied by the current (A). (It’s a bit more complicated if the current is pulsing or whatever, but I won’t get in to that.)
I’m not particularly looking for crazy stunts and actually DGW is mostly much more cerebral. It’s mostly something of an electrical engineering demonstration. But he certainly doesn’t let safety concerns get in the way of his fun.