Not taking into account a need for power conditioning, I’m talking about actual protection from electrical surges. Are the fuses that are present in many components enough protection from such? A so called “direct hit” would probably wipe out any surge protecter and damage your component anyway. So would one be pretty much as safe with no external surge protection (as long as your component has a fuse)?
Again, I’m only talking about Surge protection itself.
While on the topic of protection, what ever happened to lighting rods. Where I grew up every farm house and many barns had them.
Not in Florida their not.
Good question. I spent some time talking with Darren about this and his answer was quite succinct - fuses are there to prevent a fire, not protect the component.
In electrical engineering terms, fuses are quite slow, and the power supply in the piece of kit they’re installed in can take a big hit before the fuse blows. It’s not uncommon for a unit that took a hit without protection to continually blow replacement fuses. This is because the surge damaged the circuitry in the unit.
You’ll want MOVs or varistors to protect your gear.
A telling illustration of this: we had a customer in South Africa running an older P300. The power line near his house took a massive lightning hit - it was as close to a direct hit as you can get without the lightning hitting his house and his P300 was nuked. Everything downstream was totally fine, though.
All that’s to say I’d sooner trust MOVs for protection than a fuse 
I figure it probably has to do with a couple different reasons. First off at a glance installing lightning rods is not a trivial expense (couple thousand dollars); plus it seems the trend now for residential lightning rods is to build several smaller rods instead of a few big ones, so they’re probably harder to notice.
And last but not least, as areas become more populated, the odds that your house is the tallest in the area goes down, meaning the odds of your home getting struck also goes down.
Look into Zero Surge, Brick Wall and SurgeX. All good for more than one surge unlike standard surge bars.
Solid advice for sure. It’s worth assessing based on your system, though I would 100% be using something similar were I in Florida or other areas with lots of lightning strikes.
Yikes. My advice is to stay away from Zero Surge and Brick Wall as they have huge inductors designed to slow down the incoming AC through impedance to give the surge protector time to react. The opposite of what you want in SQ.
That is what I mean. The old saying is “plug your amp directly to the wall” everything else can get connected to a surge protection power strip, etc. It’s funny how many opinions exist on this topic. I guess one could compare the sound of the amp connected to a surge protector vs non. However that may take a while depending on the sonics of the recordings you are actually comparing.
I want my pre amp and amps to sound their best…however, I don’t want them destroyed either. I guess in the end, having good insurance coverage may be the best one could do without spending boat loads of money.
The Zero Surge unit with 10 outlets can be purchased direct from the factory for about $250.
Isn’t Zero Surge and Surgex pretty much the same technology? I believe original owner of one started the other or something.
I think you may be correct but one is ID only and a bit cheaper.
You can have excellent surge protection with a simple MOV of big enough quality across the line. That doesn’t need to be the one I just mentioned. There’s perhaps plenty of good quality effective surge protectors you can get that protect and save equipment
without mucking up the sound.
How does one figure out how large of MOV that will be adequate?
Surges and spikes that may damage equipment are extremely rare in this country. The MOV should be big enough to handle the small chance of one occurring without self destruction. Or, if it does self destruct, opens a fuse to then shut down the unit until it’s
replaced.
In our Dectet that’s what we do though with a circuit breaker instead.