To Surge Protect or Not to Surge Protect

To surge-protect, or not to surge-protect: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the pursuit of sonic perfection to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous mainline spikes,
Or to take arms against a sea of repair costs,
And by opposing end them? To use MOV: to use hydrolic circuit breakers;
No more; and by protect to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That an unprotected component is heir to, …

During our lightning strike, we were most fortunate that most of the equipment was off, and even unplugged, because of all the lightning we had been getting. But this did not provide us any data on the efficacy of the surge protectors we use here, 7 in all, of the Office Depot variety [their best surge protesters but with NO conditioning].

But my office TV was plugged in to a UPS, a Best Fortress 1020, one of the better ones [FYI, APC is the Bose of UPS’s]. But the TV died, though none of the other dozen of things plugged in to the UPS died.

It apparently died because although the power went through the UPS, the TV cable went through a standard Office Depot-style surge protector, and the cable had enough current to kill the TV. And although the phone line went through the Surge Protector, both the computer and TiVo phone cable interfaces fried.

The point being, that the one surge protector that was in a position to help appears to have failed.

Second hand data, from the insurance claim people, is that these types of serge protectors never work. Seems like if they worked insurance agents would encourage their use because that would lower the amount of the claims they have to pay off.

So…

What to do, what to do.

As for right now, we are backing away from surge-protecting everything.

We have tried a little $200 Furutech 6-outlet strip. It did sound better than the Office Depot strips. And they are available everywhere online and often at real good discounts [see previous post].

Then there are things like the Nordost Thor, the Shunyata Hydra (some of which have advanced surge protection) in the $2K+ category. Still $14K is a lot to spend on glorified ‘strips’. At least to us.

And there are the various conditioners, all of which suck, except the Sound Applications, but that is at $7K. And perhaps the Acrolink monster, which we haven’t tried and at an even higher price [and a lot of people like the PowerWing, but we haven’t heard it, so… lots of people can be wrong. Just saying.]. And putting any of them on amps? I …don’t …think …so.

I don’t know, we get $22K/meter ODIN interconnects but don’t want to spend $14K+ on audiophile-grade power strips. What is WRONG with us? 🙂

[Neli talks about a ‘whole house surge protector’. I think that if that thing messed up the sound then we would be in a heap of trouble. Nowhere to hide.]