ExactPower™ And AC Boxes In General
Dear Gary:
Due in part to reviews in your magazine and others, I purchased an Equi=Tech balanced power unit awhile back. I am, and have been, quite pleased with it. I fully agree with the sentiment that a well-performing AC box is just as valuable to a home theatre system as a DVD player, display, loudspeakers, etc., and hence, a person should accordingly appropriately budget towards that end.
But there is a lot of snake oil out there too, and sometimes I can’t differentiate between what seems real and what seems like pure hogwash. For example, I tried out a few of the Richard Gray Power Company boxes. I didn’t really see or hear any benefits at all. And I tried! Audio, video, analog, digital–– no matter how I sliced it, nada. But then I asked an electrical engineering friend of mine about them. He said, for inductors to have any role at all in the AC line, they need to be in series and not in parallel. Okay, wrote them off.
1) Doug Blackburn just reviewed the new ExactPower™ UltraPure. I like how he compares the subjective improvements between this one and the units he’s looked at in the past. I am fairly familiar with the EP15A. What doesn’t make sense, is why you’d need a balanced power unit in conjunction with the EP15A in the first place? The EP15A supposedly corrects the AC line to a perfect 60 Hz sine wave. Okay... If it is a perfect 60 Hz sine wave (anti-phase components can do this), then the noise has been corrected anyway, and there should be no need of any further noise reduction via balanced power. I asked this of the ExactPower people a long time ago, and I got no response from them. So I kept my Equi=Tech.
Contributing Editor Doug Blackburn Comments: Clean power from the wall is one goal of power conditioning. Another goal is to keep each component from putting any kind of noise on the power line that can get to other components. The UltraPure, like many power-conditioning devices, isolates groups of outlets from each other by providing separate transformers and separate filter networks. So when you connect different components to different outlet groups, the noise the components create on the power line is reduced significantly, so it cannot get to components in other protected groups. The UltraPure puts an extra line of defense against noise on the output of the EP15A. I was careful to say in the review that the EP15A and UltraPure are both great products on their own, and you do absolutely not need to have both. In fact, I said the gain from adding the UltraPure to an EP15A was something only the perfectionist would likely notice. And as always with power-conditioning products, your results may vary due to differences in your local power and in the components used in your system.
2) Mr. Blackburn says the new ExactPower UltraPure is novel because it filters down into the audible frequencies of the AC line. That does not seem like a good thing to do. All an amplifier is, for example, is a device that results in gain of a low-level signal by modulating the AC line. Doesn’t seem like a good thing to apply filtration within those frequencies. I seem to recall Equi=Tech’s Martin Glasband also saying this at the last Home Entertainment Show in San Francisco.
Contributing Editor Doug Blackburn Comments: But the power amplifier filters in the UltraPure do not operate down to those low frequencies. The low-frequency filtering is applied to the UltraPure outlets to prevent the modulation caused by power amplifiers to affect the source components. This is the beauty of the design… the filtering is applied, not universally, but only where it is useful.
3) I am a big fan of the PS Audio power plants, but I’ve never been thrilled with their cost, weight/size, and efficiency for what I’d need to power my home theatre with. But the Power Plant Premier changes things. Will Widescreen Review and Doug ever look at this unit? Almost seems too good to be true, compared to the PS300/600/1000 etc. in terms of what you get versus cost, weight/size, etc.
Contributing Editor Doug Blackburn Comments: I agree that the nearly classic PS Audio power regenerators are inefficient, hot running, and expensive. To get enough power for a big home theatre system would be quite expensive and would probably require multiple units, further increasing the heat and inefficiency issues. It’s hard to predict the future regarding a review of the Premier, but it would certainly be an interesting product to review.
4) To get back to the new ExactPower UltraPure, one reason why I’d never touch something like this is that with my Equi=Tech 2Q, I can power my entire home theatre from one box. “Every” component, including power amplifiers, get the benefit of balanced power. To me, the ExactPower UltraPure is a compromise because only low-power (source) components can be powered with its measly balanced power capability. Boxes by Monster® and Panamax® also have this problem. I run my 2Q into a dedicated 20A line to get maximum benefit of its abilities.
Contributing Editor Doug Blackburn Comments: Every power-conditioning product has strengths and weaknesses. The UltraPure is a $2,000 product, while the Equi=Tech 2Q is a $3,500 product. For a lot of budgets, the price difference alone would be a deal-breaker. Equi=Tech’s $2,000 product is more directly comparable to the UltraPure, but there are still differences enough between the two products to make the decision difficult. Equi=Tech and ExactPower both make excellent products that perform very well. Your budget and preferences for features should guide your purchase decision.
As happy as I am with the Equi=Tech, I do continue to look for voltage regulation as well as the perfect sine wave. But I’d like all that in one box. (I don’t have the rack space for more than one AC box. So for right now, it’s still the Equi=Tech for me.)
Thanks, and I look forward to the continued good info you put out concerning the stupid HD DVD/Blu-ray Disc format war. I fall into the category that I am extremely interested in HD video, but I won’t touch either format until one of them “wins,” or I can get one player to play everything, SA-CD and DVD-Audio included. Might be a while, but I can wait.
Kevin Brown
Contributing Editor Doug Blackburn Replies To Each Point In The Email Above.
You can E-mail Widescreen Review @ mailto:editorgary@widescreenreview.com