Surge protection

.

It is good to figure out that "surge protection" is not what you need first and foremost.
Yes you need it but it will do nothing when voltage dips, browns or blacks out.
S/P is good when you lose power and it "hits" your circuits on power up.

A UPS is a good investment. I got a massive commercial unit from a eBay from a hospital in Canada.
Cost more to ship it than the unit did. Put in 75.00 in new batteries. For about 150 bucks I wound
up with a unit that was 1500.00 when it was new. I can run my entire studio on it and it's dead silent.

That was 4 or 5 years ago and it's still going strong.

For basic surge protection pretty much anything is fine, including the resettable hardware-store power strips. It's mostly a matter of how much protection you want (measured in Jules), and you can get a lot of protection pretty inexpensively, and a great many of them even come with liability guarantees. In most cases, surge suppression is the only really critical protection. If you want an extra layer of protection against brownouts and blackouts, you can pick up a battery backup UPS, and again, for most home studios the primary value is just having something that will give you time to shut down when you lose power, so something designed for office computers should work fine.

That said, with all things audio, there is of course a much murkier world just under the surface, with wildly varying degrees of legitimacy. The big question is whether you can affect sound quality by doing things to the incoming power, and there is no easy answer. As long as you are using devices with good-quality, adequately-sized power supplies (which of course we should be doing anyway), the individual devices themselves *should* have a fair degree of isolation from voltage irregularities. However, severe voltage fluctuations, electrical noise, clipped waveforms, and so on can creep into the internal stepped-down power inside the audio devices and cause sonic problems. In those cases, "power conditioning" could solve certain problems.

However, "power conditioning" usually has no affect on the sound of good-quality devices, and can actually *cause* problems where none were before. For instance most surge suppressors, such as the aforementioned hardware store power strips and those rackmount Furman things with the little pull-out lights, actually use a capacitor to hard-limit the incoming voltage if it exceeds 120 or whatever. This means that a slight and thoroughly harmless over-voltage at the outlet becomes a nasty, clipped 60-cycle square wave being fed into your device. Does this matter? Will it affect your ultimate perceived sound quality? Maybe, maybe not. It depends how serious the problem is and how sensitive your equipment is.

Moreover any "improvement" depends completely on whether the specific conditioning fixes your own specific problem. Unfortunately, this kind of troubleshooting is rather a dark art. Neither electricians nor other studio operators are necessarily a reliable source of information, and there are not very many people in the world who ave put any great thought or effort into into this stuff on a broad enough basis, comparing different facilities. Those that have are very often purveyors of questionable and often potentially unsafe audiophile black boxes.

The devil is very much in the details with this stuff. One studio may report that device X made a huge improvement in the quality of their sound, another may say that it actually made things worse, and a third may say that there was no difference at all, and all three might right, depending on the particulars.

Sorry for the non-answer.

Cheers.

ORIGINAL: krizrox

We're in the same geographical area. I get frequent brown outs (luckily not that many blackouts - maybe once a year). I have a two-pronged approach:

1) Furman AR1215 voltage regulator - returns a stable 120V AC within a variable capture range.
2) A UPS - just a plain-jane Officemax UPS I bought to keep the system up and running for a few minutes in the event of a blackout.

These two items have kept me happy for years now. It might be possible to find a unit that does both things.

Anything else is snake oil as far as I'm concerned. I have been through every band-aid known to man. Power conditioners have limited usefullness (probably better for live shows). But the convenience of a rack outlet can't be understated. I like Furman products. Been using them for years. Tripplite is also good.

Great advice already in this thread. Like Larry, I'm going to weigh in more on the practical side than on theory:

Blackouts: You need an UPS. Lots of recommendations already.
Brownouts: You need a voltage regulator or line conditioner. Larry gave you the Furman AR model. Here are some Tripp-Lite models worth considering.