power center advice

[knockturnal]

thinking about getting the Monster Home Theater Reference HTS 5100 MKII Power Center. is it worth buying or would a good power bar do the trick? any other suggestions?

 

[davidtwotrees]

To me, it has way too many bells and whistles. The whole idea of a power center, imho, is to put 10 outlets right in the stack of your rig- which is why a power center is preferable to a power strip.
I'm not sure if money is an issue to you, but for half the price or less of that power center, you can get one that does the same thing.
Fyi. Monster is a dirty word on this site. They have terrible business practices. I believe belkin, tripp and furman are recommended here for power centers. Do some searches and read some threads. If you look there is a whole section for threads called A/V interconnects, cables, and Power conditioners- there is more info there than you could ever need. People respond better here if you have done your homework and searched the site to see if the topic has been brought up before. I can say I owned a used Monster 2600? and it worked fine.

 

[highfigh]

thinking about getting the Monster Home Theater Reference HTS 5100 MKII Power Center. is it worth buying or would a good power bar do the trick? any other suggestions?

You need to find out if you have problems with the power supplied by your energy company. If it's clean and stable (unlikely in most places), great- a whole house surge protector should be enough. If you live near radio/TV towers or power sub-stations, you may need something to stabilize the voltage and remove noise. Maybe. I worked for a Monster Cable dealer and wanted to find out if their claims of "total noise filtering" were accurate, so I borrowed the Dr Noise thing that shows noise on the power coming in and when the power strip is installed, it's supposed to be quiet. Without a power strip at all, I could hear a baseball game from one of the radio transmitters less than a mile from my house. With the Munster Power strip, most of it was gone and with the $9 power strip I got at Office Depot, it was totally silent. Listening to the system, I couldn't hear a difference.

However, microprocessors don't live long when power fluctuates wildly and spikes cause early failure. Many other electronic devices don't care but failing processors make receivers, BD players, servers, computers and other devices don't live long when power is unstable.

I would consider a UPS with some surge protection, remembering that UPS means 'Un-interruptible Power Supply' and that has nothing to do with surge suppression or conditioning, by definition.