Ken Houseley from the Monster Cable company came into studio to educate me a bit on surge protectors, but mostly on how to clean up the electrical current within our house.
We all buy bus bars with surge protection for our computers, maybe even our more expensive TV sets and sound systems. Some of them actually work, but here you get what you pay for. If you pay too little, large surges or spikes may get through the device and damage your equipment. That's the big crises problem. But how about noise?
Some of us will hear or see static run across our TV screen when the refrigerator or furnace motor turns on or off. That is electrical interference, or noise, that is generated within our house by all electrical devices. Even our computer creates noise that can bother other things, and many things create noise that can bother our computers. We are usually not aware of this noise unless we have a quality sound system, or high quality TV sets. But the noise is always there and in fact it is wearing down the electronics in all our equipment.
So Ken and his Monster Cable power management staff work at filtering out those noises that are in the lines, using specific filters for each type of device. They sell bus bars like everyone else, but they also sell bus bars that surge protect and filter for cable and telephone line connections at the same time. At the top of the line, for your home theatre buffs, the filters are all independent of each other with each unit of a system getting its own clean electricity.
I knew about surge protection, but I did not know about filtering for better performance and longer life from our high tech sound, video, and computer systems. Since this show we have tested out this equipment and found that in fact sound and picture quality is greatly improved with a "clean" power supply. Amazing stuff.