Power Conditioners?


From Jim McCalister,
New to Audiogon, and looking to find a suitable power conditioner to replace my Monsterpower HTPS 7000 MKII. Unfortunately, it self ignited ending an evening of music and local beers with a few of my mates. What a waste of beer! No warrantee any more, so I'm looking to find more reliable noise control and spike protection. I live near a processing plant in the countryside, so spikes occur often. I suspect that the Monster unit eventually wore itself out as a result, so I don't want to replace the Monster unit with another, as my confidence is shaken a bit.... but they are somewhat cheap! I see Richard Gray, MIT and APC out there a lot, but few people I know are that familiar with any. Any suggestions for a green lad from New Zealand?
jmcallistair
There are not many conditioners that can withstand a continuous assault of spikes and surges without breaking down. The isolation transformer is an exception. Although the large-sized unit (up to 5 KVA) you need for a complete system is heavy and expensive at retail, they can be found on eBay at prices which make them competitive with commercial audio gear. As a bonus, they do a great job on sound, with improvement pretty much across-the-board.
Remember that power conditioning consists of three things -- RF filtation to eliminate hash, surge protection to suppress voltage spikes, and also battery backup to eliminate voltage dips. However, most battery backups cannot be used with amplifiers or other high current/high wattage devices.

Any UPS at your local electronics retailer will do those things (excluding backing up your amplifier) for less than US$100. I use an old Adcom ACE 515 and a Monster Power HTS850 (neither of which I recommend), both plugged into a CyberPower UPS, giving me three layers of surge protection and hash filtration, and one layer of battery backup. Eventually I will get rid of the first two products and just use the UPS, with my amplifiers plugged into the filtered-but-not-battery-backup outlets.
You need surge protection more than conditioning.
Not all conditioners have surge protection.

If your problem is that bad, look into whole house surge protection. They cost $200 to $250. Protect everything in your house with one device. It goes with the AC panel where the power comes into the house. APC, Leviton, and many others make them. Then get the conditioner that makes your system sound the best regardless.
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