Power conditioners. Nothing lives lower on the home entertainment food chain than a device that takes electricity in and puts out... electricity. What a concept. How much do I owe you? Therefore, it's easy to understand why most people just assume all their audio and video equipment should plug in to a series of plastic hardware store "surge protectors" as long as they have enough outlets to satisfy the needs of their systems. Let me propose two reasons to relegate those devices to table-lamp-plus-aquarium-pump-duty where they belong and actually get excited about power line conditioning.
The reason your left brain wants to hear is that the correct devices provide comprehensive and reliable protection from all the insidious vagaries borne into your home on the electrical service which, either over time or suddenly, take their toll on your expensive entertainment equipment. The best ones also do so without giving up their own lives or losing effectiveness over time in the process.
While that kind of peace of mind is really important, and the reason most people sort of begrudgingly pony up for real line protection, the thing that catapults a great power line conditioner from the bottom of the food chain to king of the jungle status is the fact that it can make really significant improvements in picture and sound quality. I'm talking plainly obvious and exciting steps forward in resolution here, both audio and video. These are the very same kinds of performance upgrades you'd very willingly pay seriously more money for if they came housed in a component you knew you needed anyway - a preamp, plasma display or pair of loudspeakers for example.
That's one of the troubles with the whole category of power line conditioners. Technically speaking, you don't need them. They dwell in that red-headed stepchild category along with things like expensive cables or specially designed equipment-housing furniture that makes your system sound better. It's easy to dismiss them all as pursuits whose fruits can only be appreciated by the fanatical "phile."
Although we at Ultra Fidelis endorse, recommend, and sell high quality cables and equipment furniture, both of which make equipment perform very obviously better, we have a long history of being unimpressed with the ramifications of power line conditioners in our audio systems - always a seeming trade off of a few performance improvements for some (or a lot of) detriment - we're guilty of a little painting with a broad brush and, as a result, we come a little late to the Furman party. It took endorsements from a couple of the people in our industry whose opinions we regard most highly to get us to investigate the line in the first place. But let us make up for lost time starting right now- Furman, where have you been all our lives?
I am just today coming off a night of listening to my home system fully Furmanized and I have to say, in complete sincerity, I cannot remember the last performance upgrade I made in my system that moved the sound quality up- opened the door so much- as these heretofore "optional" components. Every single aspect of the sound of music through this system is dramatically superior to the same system without the Furman line conditioners. No matter how you like to dissect the sound to describe it, those things all got better. Bass extension and control, tonal balance and color palette, human sounding voices, all aspects of realistic 3-D imaging, dynamics - the whole envelope is pushed much farther out. I even have my power amp plugged into Furman's Power Factor conditioning. This was always the last hurdle that no power conditioner we had auditioned could come close to jumping, but the Furman does it great. My power amp sounds much better plugged in to the Furman than it does plugged in to the wall - tautness, but with incredible extension in the bass, and seemingly twice as much power as without.
And don't even get me started on what these devices do for video. It's absolute magic for everything from small LCDs to plasmas and big front projectors. And this magic takes very much the same form as it does with the audio - everything is just so much more alive and real, more human. It is literally able to make standard DVD appear "HD-like" on a display that's just a little too big to successfully pull it off without help. Amazing!
Instead of seeing power conditioners as "someday options," you can no longer afford to think about a system without at least one Furman. They vault power conditioners into the Necessary Component category very convincingly.
