Fancy Surge Protectors necessary?

[denon]

I just bought a plasma monitor and a Denon AVR 3805. Do I need a fancy Surge Protector? Do they really make the picture or sound better? I know that a surge protector is a good thing but should I spend another $200 or is the $30 one fine?

Thanks

 

[Az B]

Other than cosmetics and maybe some convenience, the high priced Monster and other similar power conditioners offer the same exact protection that a Tripplite Isobar will provide. And the Tripplite will be less than half the cost.

 

[warnerwh]

The Powervar and Oneac power conditioners also are very good and can be had for cheap on Ebay. They're not as pretty as Monster or some of the other boutique conditioners but they do the job just as well and better than many. Hospitals, labs and other businesses that want clean power use these and depend on them. They are well made and last for many years. Cheaper surge suppressors usually have MOV's which can wear out and be useless after a while. The Oneac and Powervars suppress surges, remove rfi/emi and isolate. Also the brands I mentioned above costs hundreds or more new can be had for a small fraction of that on Ebay. Whether they will help your system sound better or your picture look better is questionable. They will help keep the electronics in your equipment safe and provide clean power quite possibly allowing the equipment to last longer. The audiophile grade ones can be had that are very good but I seriously doubt they work any better unless you believe in the tooth fairy. Just be sure to get one that has an amperage rating exceeding what will be plugged into it. You can look in your owners manuals to see the current draw in watts to figure it out.

 

[djoxygen]

How much improvement you will see depends on how clean the power is in your place. A $30 surge protector won't do anything but (hopefully) protect your gear when lighting strikes. If you have good clean power a $2000 balanced power supply might not make a noticable difference.

My personal feeling is that $5K of gear is worth spending a little extra on a true isolation transformer isn't a bad idea. I use an APC Line-R (under $100) and I have to see a serious brown-out before my gear notices.

 

[jaxvon]

Just as another question: Does balanced power really help? I've seen Equitech stuff in some pro setups, but I was wondering if it's just snake oil of if it really helps?

 

[Mudcat]

I use the Tripplite LCR2400. Similar to but larger than their ISOBAR. I've had a lot of brown outs, and this thing keeps the power at a nice flat 120 during the worst events I've had.

 

[plhart]

I totally agree with Az_B. I bought an 8 outlet Tripp-lite Isobar for my 40" Mitsubishi CRT a couple of years back. The TV is 8 years old now but still about as good as 525 line NTSC gets. With the Triplitte in-line everyone, and I mean even the most untrained people see a very noticeable difference in picture color fidelity and lack of noise.

I still can see that it's not completely filtering all the line junk if I play something like the THX remastered and boxed DVD set of The Indiana Jones series during the daytime versus at night when more people are loading down the power lines in the neighborhood and injecting more garbage back into the line.

I should mention that I've got the new $450 Yamaha universal DVD player in for review so it is partly due to the excellence of the Yamaha DVD-S1500's 12 bit/108MHz video DACs that the difference of Tripp-lite-in vs. Tripp-lite-out of system is so noticeable.

I've been ISF certified for many years. So at Audioholics we will continue to review some of the newer line conditioners that come on the market. I personally feel that conditioners which use MOVs like the Tripp-lite does may deteriorate very slowly in their filtering capabilities after a few years of getting hit by line spikes so Gene and I are looking toward conditioners which don't use these devices such as the conditioner just introduced by the Tributaries folks. But for the money you can't beat it. And you can always put it on your computer if you want to upgrade.

 

[Mr.T]

You don't need to spend big bucks on an efficient power conditioner.
The triplite LC2400 is a great choice and it works even better than Monster expensive fancy crap.

Mr.T