Setting up a P5

Power Components
1

  1. Does my NuWave Phono Converter belong on a zone with analog or digital equipment? Traditional phono stages are analog, of course, but since the NPC can convert a signal to digital I wonder if it might send digital nasties back into the power line. It would be more convenient if I could keep on the same zone with my turntable, though. Mostly I use it to play LPs via my (analog) preamp, less often to rip LPs

  2. I read in the P5 manual about wattage vs volt/amps. This isn’t very helpful, at least for me. What I want to do is make sure I can (if I choose) use my amps with the P5. I know how many watts they and my other equipment draw, as specified in the user manuals. Do I need to do some sort of conversion? Or are watts and volt/amps close enough for general purposes that I can treat them as equivalent, at least in cases like mine where I will not (as far as I can imagine) be pushing the envelope in terms of what the P5 can handle?

2

Great questions.

For the first, I choose digital zone. While the instrument is certainly a hybrid of both, its digital sections need more protection than its analog areas, thus, if you had to choose, go for adding it to the other digital zones.

On the second question, simple volt amp calculations are just fine. Certainly we can get more accurate answers knowing the power factor etc. but in nearly all cases, a simple wattage figure will do and for a couple of reasons: power amps almost never use anywhere near their rated power, and Power Plants have huge capacity for instant current delivery of lower power factor equipment. In other words, Power Plants typically handle products without much further thought - and the P5 handles most all systems without a problem.

3

Thanks, Paul. I’ll see if I can reconfigure things to get the NPC on a digital zone.

4

At the risk of repeating the original question, on my (Irish, or even UK) unit there is 1 HC outlet, what is high with regard to current? I’ll be using headphone amplifiers, or maybe a Lavardin integrated amplifier.

5

The HC outlet does not provide a higher level of current than the others, but has an inrush limiter. This prevents devices that draw a lot of watts from tripping circuit breakers or perhaps overwhelming the P5 with a sudden huge demand. Power amplifiers are typically connected to the HD outlet, although any device can be.