The Pendulum has a proper power supply built in. All you need is a standard power cord.
The Pendulum is quite colored, but not like you probably think of a pre being colored. It's not 1073 sounding at all. It does not have that "mid range" thing going -- it does not make tracks more forword or more dense.
Think lush, opulent, open, musical, creamy, big, huge -- this probably isn't the pre you would want to use on every or even most of the tracks in a song, it's just so amazing sounding you want it to help spotlight. It's such a different sound from the 'neve' sound. This is not to say anything bad about the 1073 sound -- just the Pendulum is a totally different character.
I just bought the thing having listened to it with an R84 ribbon attached, so my experience is pretty virgin. That said, I think it would be a natural first choice for crooner vocals, clean tone guitar, bass, acoustic guitar, a softer drum overhead sound (if crispy/punchy wasn't what you wanted), and so forth.
As for recording rock and roll, or hell, running the 2-bus through something to glue it together, the Pendulum has a very nice attuenator on the output. Gain goes up, auttenate rolls the output back, color gets richer. I deliberately overdrove the inputs with an SM57 and was quite impressed with the slow onset and creamy nature of the distortion on the Pendulum.
I bought both the Pendulum and the Great River NV2 that day. I was just knocked down by both. Just killer pieces.
--Jim