ANY general rules of thumb on UPS's, Conditioners, Surge Protectors, etc.

you sound very gracious.

subscribed to your thread as I have the same questions you do. I just lost an old Nakamichi Receiver1 I've been using to a power blip. Everything else flipped back on immediately, but my Nakamichi is dead. Bummer.

 

Cyberpower makes a line of "pure sine wave" UPS. They look interesting.

 

Thats poor advice for someone wanting a concrete answer.

 

I'm very grateful for the advice here..never been in a house before where I could actually do something about the power going into a dozzen pieces of equipment and wallwarts galore. Sorry about your Nak.

 

a lot depends on budget and how minor the differences in SQ might be...

 

Why are you saying that to me when the topic is rules of thumb?

 

For the same reason 2 other forum members did also.
No disrespect intended at all, but Trust your ears, in theory sounds good, but in practice tries to disregard several other factors by implementing a change.

 

Highlander has a point: "trusting your ears" is of course a good start...providing you have five other units handy to switch-in and -out, so make such comparison. And of course, when buying used...how do you know the other party would take it back if your ears say it wasn't worth the money you laid out to try them?

40+ years in, and I'm in my first house, and only now ready to start making permanent decisions. Can't even move my desk into position until I have a couple units plugged into my new dedicated circuits. Can't even "move in" the office and start putting things away, until I move my desk into position. At this point, my simplest answer is to just go down to Costco, pick up an APC UPS unit, and "git 'er done". If I were only in, say, Gettysburg, I might not have even that much of a choice: watever WalMart's got on the shelf or take the over 20 pieces of good advice here, buy 20 units online, and experiment to my hearts' content...once my wife leaves me. Altoona? Who knows - I might be blessed to have both a WalMart and a Costco...

So at this situation, "trust your ears" sounds a lot like just, "do your own work and leave me alone...but I'm glad to post this indifference into your thread to show you how much respect I have for you". I'm sure this is not the real sentiment, you're probably a veryy nice gent...but for an audiophile lacking this type of expertise, and just looking to solve a problem...that's what one might get when they "trust their ears".

Can you empathize with that impression?

 

I am really sorry, I did not mean anything negative at all, and I feel bad I was perceived that way. I was trying to give my best wisdom based on the thread topic and looking back at your original post, you are looking for specifics instead of general rules of thumb, and I was trying to stay away from any specific brands or products based on your comment in that post about how you didn't like certain people delving into that, and I also maintain that trusting yourself is good advice for any of your hobbies. If a whiskey tastes good to you, then it is good for you. If a power conditioner sounds good to you in a system of yours, its good for you. Choice based on trusting some manufacturers datasheet or someone else's model of the physical world along with their explicit and implicit assumptions is not as good. I would rather not preach specific products since I only have my own data points, as we all do, but I am happy to help more there if you want since I have spent a lot of hours and a lot of money in that area.

My advice is still the best I have for general rules of thumb, but if you are stuck with Costco or Wal-mart, Costco has a good return policy so you could try buying a few things there and experimenting. I would keep your computers as separate electrically as possible from your audio, and your audio pieces as separate from each other electrically as possible as well.

So, in your computer room I would put your stereo stuff on your dedicated line and keep everything off of that line and on the general house outlets. Then on that dedicated line, you need to weigh surge protection and power conditioning versus sound quality, and various products make different trade-offs with that. You could try starting plugging your stereo gear directly into the wall, then compare the sound of that to whatever you can get from your stores. You could try putting your digital sources behind a separate layer of conditioning, I've found that to help. I have one plug of the duplex going to a power conditioner and then my amp, and the other plug of the duplex going to a different power conditioner and then to my digital source.

For your front room, I would try to keep things separated, but you don't have the luxury of being separate from everything else with no dedicated line.

For your basement, I have the same advice as for the computer room. If you put your computer in there, I would put it behind a separate power conditioner. I would also put ferrite beads on your computer power cables, fridge cables, and whatever else you feel like that is outside of your stereo and home theater system.

I also am in my first house now and have a fileserver and music in different rooms with the squeeezebox ecosystem if you have any questions on that.

 

Let's try some questions - do you have anything that uses a wall wart? or does everything have its own transformer?

if warts, list each item...

 

Lessee, upstairs in computer/studio/office, there's one on the FiOS router, one on the 5-port Ethernet switch, one on the 5-HDD enclosure holding my drives while I fill them with music before putting them into a server downstairs. I have an Air Port router for better Wi-Fi, so there's another. Also, a Fantom "green drive" I plug in on occasion. So that's 5.

Basement system, there's one on the 5-port Ethernet switch, one on the Denon AVR's iPhone attachment (which I have to have in order to use a universal remote), so that's two.

Upstairs living room, another 5-port Ethernet switch, and perhaps one on the Playstation 5, I don't remember. So, 1 or 2.

Also, I have one on my left hand...but I'm in process of freezing it off...

 

I finally did go with the Brick Walls: one upstairs for the office, one down in the Media setup. Only crazy issue, their wall plugs are flat, and come in at a 45-degree angle (that is, as you plug into the wall, it approaches the outlet from "8-o'clock", and you can't plug in another one to the top outlet because they won't both fit). So that one goes to the audio, and a MOV-fortified UPC with a normal plug can go on the upper outlet, to plug in most of the compyooter stuff. Same downstairs, so it'll be the audio on the Brick Wall, video equip (save for the Oppo) coming into the other outlet.

Next year, one for the light strings on the tree!