Apr
18
Power Conditioners and Surge Protectors
Filed Under Equipment
Firstly know that power conditioners don’t necessarily protect against surges and most surge protectors don’t “condition” power. Those aren’t necessarily bad things (as far as I’m concerned) because as I’ll explain I’m not a proponent of one of the two devices. Surge protectors are a vital, necessary part of protecting any home theater but power conditioners have to be judged on a case by case basis.
In a nutshell, surge protectors are used to (you guessed it) protect your system against power surges. Power conditioners are intended to “condition” your homes AC power before it reaches your gear, under the guise of improving or enhancing the audio and or video performance of your system.
Years ago while working in a high-end audio boutique, we received a power conditioner from a well know vendor for evaluation. This particular conditioner was intended to “clean up” video noise, and while we could indeed see a small improvement in clarity with our display plugged into the device, the audio we were hearing through the surround system, also plugged into the device, sounded noticeably worse.
I’m sure the inferior sound was due to current limiting but my point is, unless you want to have three or four of these devices behind your equipment rack, all doing slightly different jobs with slightly different levels of performance, my recommendation is to stick to surge protection and spend the difference on better gear.
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