Power Conditioners and Voltage Regulators

[wvrick]

It seems there is a great deal of opinion on the necessity of power conditioners and voltage regulators for AV equipment.  Are they necessary?  A good idea? Or a waste of money?  Would love to hear your opinion and why.

[405x5]

95 percent of the time unnecessary.
Smart move......start without either and evaluate. THEN......If you notice an issue with either picture or audio that your existing (within the components) power supplies cannot deal with, take it from there.

Bill

[wvrick]

Thanks Bill, I was thinking along those lines.

[Casey Leedom]

Yeah, with a well designed power supply in each of your pieces of equipment, a Power Conditioner is probably mostly unnecessary. I just rationalized mine as an expensive Power Strip in order to neatly handle all the power cords.

Casey

[bluemeanies]

Here is the other side of the coin. I never had a poblem until a few months ago. I have the FURMAN ELITE and it by itself will not prevent damage to your equipment. Recently to protect (as best I can) I purchased two surge fault interruptors from HD. They each have three outlets at a cost of $26.00 a piece. They are manual reset which is important. Some of my equipment is connected to the FURMAN and in turn connected to one of the fault interruptors. The rest of my equipment except for the Outlaw 7700 amplifier which is as per manual connected to a wall outlet is connected to the remaining outlets on the fault interruptors.
Mother Nature holds all of the cards but I DO feel I have my equipment protected to the best one can make a defense against the unknown.
My tube amplifiers are connected to a Kill a Watt which in turn to a Variac and from there all connected to the surge fault line interruptor.
Along with this a six foot grounding rod.

As I mentioned, I can't fool Mother Nature but to do nothing (no protection) is asking for trouble.
A small investment is all that is needed for some peace of mind.