Surge supressors - AGAIN

[jpm]

William, to be honest about it, I've never used surge protectors in my 42 years of fooling around with stereos. My amps, receivers, TT's, CDP's and other gear have survived unharmed just fine through repeated power outages over many, many years. I don't really know why I'm so worried about it now. Anyway, I'll find out the scoop tomorrow and go from there.

[WMcD]

Well I've not had problems with spikes hurting equipment either. It may well be that the power lines in Chicago and New York don't get the lightning hits as other do, and there are no spikes to speak of, in my case.

I don't doubt that other parts of the country do have problems and that some protective measures are effective.

The issue is whether a.c. protective devices can somehow adversely effect the signal processing aspects of our devices. There is just no evidence of such that I can see.

Gil

[dodger]

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On 2/24/2005 7:19:26 AM mdeneen wrote:

How do folks know wheather or not your MOV units are still working or have failed?

mdeneen

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On SOME, not all, the power light will change slowly from green to red.

Or take it to your utility company have them put a high number of amperes and some watts through. If it shuts down, it was working.

I do believe in the filtering. My wife would use her sewing machine which then caused "snow" on my TV, or static in the system.

I added a separate Rat Shack Surge Surpressor with EMI/RFI filtering, for her to plug her machine into, it stopped.

dodger

[jpm]

I have a dedicated 20amp circuit and line to my stereo. Nothing else shares it. That helps.

I called the maker of the surge protector this morning and asked what the clamping voltage was at the meter. 400 volts. They say their device is designed to protect white appliances such as the fridge, washer, dryer and such. 400 is much too high for stereo. So I'm not going to have it installed after all.

Back to square one.

[Spkrdctr]

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On 2/23/2005 10:40:19 PM William F. Gil McDermott wrote:

It looks like the question is whether any sort of surge surpression system, regulators, UPS, etc can cause a problem. I don't see how. I also don't see how hospital grade a.c. connectors and the like can improve anything.

First: All of us use the the typical surge protector strip on all sorts of equipment. Some is fairly sophisticated. T.V., computer, radios of all sorts. These do as much signal processing as the hi-fi gear. No one reports problems in those applications. Of course the high end guy might say these units are compromised too.

But there is no such evidence: We run microprocessors at a Ghz and there is no problem. The typical video player is doing a lot of work and putting out a signal with at least a 1.0 mHz bandwidth. Are there serious reports that video output is compromise? No. Sound is messed up, but these examples, in our experience, are not. How does that happen?

Also I don't see how any purported "bad stuff" (be it a signal or device) will influence the output side of the power supply of our gear. In the most elementry (like a classic tube amp) you've got a big cap which is pretty much going to kill anything but D.C. The more sophisticated units have much more complicate power supplies. These probably work just as well an keeps as good an eye on the purity of output voltage.

That is what I think.

Gil

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Gil, you are 100% correct. A good surge suppressor is infact needed. Buy one and then replace it every 5 years. Or, get the Brickwall type and forget about it until you pass it on to your kids. It really is not worth all of the brain power everyone is putting in to it!