power conditioner

[icarus]

O.K. I'm thinking of getting a power conditioner for my little home studio setup(DAW and a couple synths). My main priority is RFI/EMI filtration and some surge protection. I have pretty decent power in my area and am not worried about brown out protection or being able to run my stuff for four hours during a power loss. I'm leaning toward the furman pl plus because it seems to have these features while maybe falling short of a balanced power transformer or UPC (but also falling shorter in price). Does anyone have any thoughts on whether this is good for what I'm looking for? Also, I've read your power should put out a sine wave as opposed to a square wave, and even thoough I have no idea what that means, does anyone know if the pl plus will put out the desired sine wave? Thanks for any input from you wise folks.

[Michael Jones]

Well, I use a furman RR-15. Basically the bottom feeder of power conditioners. It works well enough for me, and I don't have any RFI interference. I can't really comment on the other models because I haven't used them.

A/C current is of course Alternating Current. Which is to say that it reverses its direction at regular intervals (some 60 times per second). This alternation produces a sine wave with peaks above and below a 0 current line on a graph. The peaks above and below that line are equal, but opposite in amplitude and magnitude (in theory). You see, A/C power in your home is going to flucuate (usually anywhere from 110 volts to 125 volts). That produces a rather irregular sine wave. Here's a picture of a rather rudimentary sine wave: http://www.interq.or.jp/japan/se-inoue/gif/ckt18_2.gif

A "square" wave has the tops of those peaks "shaved" off. If you've ever seen a device sold in home improvement stores to help your refergerator run smoother (you plug it in between the outlet and the refergerator). Well that device takes that peak and shaves it off, effectively producing a square wave.

The reason thats not good for a line conditioner is the the line conditioner is constantly "looking" for those peaks produced by A/C current. Any descripances, or fluctuation in the current, or in the amplitude and magnitude of those peaks, the power conditioner finds and sort of fixes them to be equal. If a square wave was produced, the power conditioner would never find those peaks, and the current would most likely pass thru the line conditioner, unconditioned.

Hope that helps.

[muzeman]

I have a small APC unit,Back Office I believe.
I was going to by a Furman unit but needed a upc also.

The APC gives you surge protection,upc,and rfi filtering on 4 outlets for half the price(or more) than the Furman unit.

Good Luck,
Pete

[Michael Jones]

If you're interested, here's a really cool link that shows you how a "Square Wave" is generated:
http://www.ece.rice.edu/~yasushi/applets/SquareWave/

[icarus]

thanks for the info. i still think i'm going to go with the pl plus because from what i've read the noise filtration on them seems to be pretty good. any other thoughts on this?