When you are shopping for components for your home entertainment system, you probably aren’t spending a ton of time thinking about power conditioners.  But these systems do more than offer protection, they also ensure you get the most out of your home theater equipment.

Here are five things to know about power conditioning, courtesy of Bob Smith, vice president of Panamax, and Garth Powell, senior product design specialist at Furman.

1) The Cost of Ignoring AC Power Protection
The price of not having power protection can be high. A premium power conditioner can range from $400 to $3500, and the more costly and complex the home theater system, the more power management equipment is likely to be required.  However, these AC management products are typically powering several thousand dollars worth of equipment.  Beyond something catastrophic such as lightning strikes and the importance of protection remember, AC power is the lifeblood of your system – and with today’s ultra-noisy aged power grids your theaters reliability and performance rely on pristine power. Your reputation is too important to gamble on a mere outlet strip, today’s theaters demand far more.

2) Effect of AC Noise on Displays
Whether it’s a flat-screen panel or a projector, your video display is the centerpiece of any home theater system. That being said, there is an important point to keep in mind when you hook up that new HDTV: the larger the screen, the more noticeable the artifacts, and deficiencies, in the picture (display output).

Artifacts and deficiencies range from image pixilation, blurred images, lack of contrast, loss of detail, color vibrancy and even green and red horizontal lines rolling up the display!  These common video distortions greatly diminish the viewing experience. A major source of these deficiencies is AC line noise. AC noise affects virtually every element involved in a high-end visual environment; masking much of the source data detail needed for the best-possible visual and audio experience.

To ensure a stunning picture and sound with increased audio and video detail, bold colors, and vibrant soundstage elimination of all AC noise is a must.  To do so, appropriate power conditioning or filtering must be properly incorporated into the home theater system.

Filtering is defined as taking the noise present on an AC line and lowering it over a wide range of frequencies so it cannot contaminate signals being captured or reproduced. The majority of available AC Power Products either don’t provide sufficient filtering or have antiquated circuit designs. It’s important to note the frequency specifications on a power management component to ensure that the device features a wide bandwidth and linearized filtering (harmonic peak elimination).  To eliminate the fullest spectrum of noise and ground noise, technologies incorporating isolation transformers, balanced power output and outlet isolation (eliminating noise contamination from theater components) are a must.

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