Power conditioner?

F

Friday0089

New member
Hey all, I've been recording things off and on for awhile and am finally out of college and I'd like to start making a home studio. I already have the basics but I am just wondering now, do I really need a power conditioner to get really good results or am I going to be ok?

Thanks!
 
I run a UPS (Un-interruptible Power Supply) which is a battery backup, that has built in conditioning and run my 2 regular power conditioners out of that. All of my gear gets plugged into the outlets built into the back of the conditioners.

Where I live, the power is notorious for brown outs and fluctuations etc....
These conditioners smooth out the spikes and dips in the juice and gives ya a cleaner signal to work with.

:drunk:
 
oh....and yeah.
Get a conditioner. :)

won't affect your sound any but will probably save some stress on yer gear. ;)
 
I always purchase power regulators cost a heck of a lot more but well worth it here in New England! Especially in the winter months!!! ;)








:cool:
 
Friday0089 said:
Hey all, I've been recording things off and on for awhile and am finally out of college and I'd like to start making a home studio. I already have the basics but I am just wondering now, do I really need a power conditioner to get really good results or am I going to be ok?

Thanks!
Click to expand...

I've had a home studio for 20+ years and don't have a power conditioner. Having one will in no way affect the results you get that I know of. Maybe it's different in different localities.
 
Buy a VOLTAGE REGULATOR. I have a Furman AR-1215 and would not play
live or record without it. This unit doles out an even power supply regardless what else is running on that line. I've had a bass amp and a guitar amp damaged by playing parties over someone's house when the power has gone off or a fridge/air conditioner kicked on. Best investment ever made!
 
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I've never owned one, and I've never had a problem with any music or computer gear in 20 years. Maybe I'm just lucky. I'm not AGAINST them, just don't feel the need for one. For live use I DO like the furman units that have the pullout lights so u can see your rack in the dark. And having more power outlets IN the rack is way handy.. I'd get one more for THOSE reasons than any paranoia about power fluctuations.
 
It's not paranoia Suprstar - it's experience. I too have been playing everywhere from backyard parties to thousand seat venues with no problems to speak of for nearly 20yrs. I can tell you what GK engineers told me and that is that alot of newer heads / preamps are more sensitive to voltage irregularities and therefore require cleaner power. I have two of these (one for my live rig and one for my studio) and haven't worried about a brownout or spike in voltage since.
 
5stringer said:
Buy a VOLTAGE REGULATOR. I have a Furman AR-1215 and would not play
live or record without it. This unit doles out an even power supply regardless what else is running on that line. I've had a bass amp and a guitar amp damaged by playing parties over someone's house when the power has gone off or a fridge/air conditioner kicked on. Best investment ever made!
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I have a pair of the Furman 20 Amp versions (AR-1220) for all my studio gear, including all my guitar amps. A single 20 Amp unit will cover a lot of gear, but if I ever needed to turn on every piece of gear (not likely), then I would need more than 20 Amps...so the second unit is more of a backup.

While a lot of gear has its own internal voltage regulation, guitar amps are immediately affected by voltage drift...and that's not uncommon with many power companies since the they all have a minimum-maximum voltage range that is considered acceptable for most uses…but it CAN affect some things.

Oh...if you use a UPS for audio gear (not just computers), make sure you get the ones that output pure sine waves. Many of your typical UPS boxes do not, and instead they kick out square-ish waves which computers don't mind, but they are not great for audio. The sine wave UPS boxes are much more expensive than a typical computer UPS.

Anyway...most times, we may not actually notice small electric issues, or minute amounts of AC noise that get added to your audio signal...but electricity only needs to zap your gear once, and then the lack of any power conditioning/protection becomes a 20/20 hindsight perspective. :)
 
Pure sine wave is overrated. Check the power from the wall sometime, it ain't nowhere close to sine wave. Gear has to be designed to cope with dirty power, otherwise it's useless in the real world.

Also, plenty of ordinary "computer-grade" UPS stuff works just fine. I have an ordinary rack-mount APC UPS unit with switching voltage regulation. Maybe a bit nicer than a UPS-only power strip, but not really that expensive or fancy, and not "designed for audio".

Here's how it performs--note that it picks up a bit of 4-8kHz hash vs. the wall, but from a PSU design standpoint that makes no difference, because it's 80dB down from the 60Hz fundamental, and 40dB down from all of the lower harmonics. If your PSU can reject 180Hz, 6kHz is generally not a problem.

Under battery power, it's actually closer to a sine wave, other than that 16kHz nastiness, which is probably the APC's internal oscillator frequency. Again, that's 70dB down from the fundamental.

Any of these supplies appears more like a flat-topped triangle wave rather than a sine or square. This is life in PSU design.

Oh, and yes I hooked the wall directly to my converters, through a 50dB 200K ohm attenuator I built. Don't try that at home if you don't know what you are doing . . . AC to XLR cables can be rather dangerous :eek:
 
Well...every little bit helps. :)

I actually don't see the benefit of using a UPS for audio gear...unless you're talking about only a couple of small pieces.
I mean...just how long could you run a 30W guitar amp, tube mic PS, preamp, comp, A/D/A interface and your computer to make it really worthwhile for a recording situation???
How long are you gonna' run on an average UPS...10 minutes...maybe?

Though I can see a UPS for the computer, so you don't lose your work and so you can shut down gracefully...that's the only place I use a UPS...but I see no point for the rest of the audio gear, not for a studio full of gear.
 
miroslav said:
Well...every little bit helps. :)

I actually don't see the benefit of using a UPS for audio gear...unless you're talking about only a couple of small pieces.
I mean...just how long could you run a 30W guitar amp, tube mic PS, preamp, comp, A/D/A interface and your computer to make it really worthwhile for a recording situation???
How long are you gonna' run on an average UPS...10 minutes...maybe?

Though I can see a UPS for the computer, so you don't lose your work and so you can shut down gracefully...that's the only place I use a UPS...but I see no point for the rest of the audio gear, not for a studio full of gear.
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Because it does run my computer and it is a voltage regulator (the power company here likes to send overvoltage, that is hard on a linear regulator) as well as some degree of surge protection, whatever that is worth (I have a couple of amps in the shop waiting for new MOVs and general cleanup from the exploded ones . . . not from my studio).
 
Yeah...I use one for my DAW also.

I meant actual audio gear...amps, preamps, comps...etc....I don't see the point/need to run them off a UPS.
For voltage regulation, the Furman stuff does the trick, one box for 20 Amps worth of gear and no need to ever replace batteries.

I'm looking to add one of the Furman balanced power boxes after my voltage regulator, just to further clean up the AC...though the AC is pretty clean at my place, but yeah, my power Co. also tends to run at the upper limit of 125V most of the time.
 
Friday0089 said:
Hey all, I've been recording things off and on for awhile and am finally out of college and I'd like to start making a home studio. I already have the basics but I am just wondering now, do I really need a power conditioner to get really good results or am I going to be ok?

Thanks!
Click to expand...

I use this in my studio. It is supposed to provide "clean power" to your gear among other things. At first I did not know what the heck "clean power" meant and I thought It was just a sales gimmick. Until I started adding more gear to my set-up and I got introduced to a new enemy of progress called "ground-loop noise". Until you suffer this problem you can not really appreciate it's magnitude. The monster power conditioner did not help AT ALL with this problem but I was able to solve it using a different device with help from this forum.

So now I use the unit more as a surge-protector and for the convenience of powering up my whole studio with one switch. Also helps avoid that heavy pop sound you get from your monitors when you power everything down at the same time because even though all your equipment might be connected to it, it powers them up and down in stages depending on what outlets you have each piece of gear on.

Oh...it also looks good on my rack :D
 
chava said:
Also helps avoid that heavy pop sound you get from your monitors when you power everything down at the same time because even though all your equipment might be connected to it, it powers them up and down in stages depending on what outlets you have each piece of gear on.
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THAT is a cool feature, never heard of that one.. That thing looks like the king of all power conditioners!
 
What I was hoping to find here but haven't, is a note about which UPS's are quieter.

I had an APC Back-UPS 540 watt unit die on me recently, that was a piece of gear from pre-home studio days. It is rated at 45 dBA at 1 meter distance, and I'd bet it's even louder than that!

Does anybody make a quieter UPS? I can't seem to find anything, with enough juice, without a high speed 40MM fan.

Thanks to people mentioning the Furman voltage regulators, I'll probably invest in one of those. Then I can at least investigate UPS units that aren't as expensive, without voltage regulation as a feature.

I'm looking to just run the DAW on the UPS, and only need enough juice to let me save work and shut down safely. I'm not looking to keep working during an outage.
 
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