“Totally” is a tough measurement to live up to. If you really try and put your ear next to the P5 when they are sometimes on you might hear something. But from a few feet away they are silent.
Just wanted to chime in on the reliability issue - My P5 has been running 24/7 for about 8 years now, absolutely not a single glitch or hiccup in all that time. I am sure that’s been the experience of the vast majority of owners. I don’t think I have ever even bothered to upgrade the firmware; it wasn’t broke, so I never fixed it. 
Same here for mine, but only at 2.5 years
Thanks! If it can’t be heard from a few feet away then I’d be OK.
You are getting good mileage out of your P5. No P5 lasted more than about one year at my home before breaking down. Same for P10. Less for PPP. However P3 has proven to be far more reliable. 3+ years now and still counting, and carrying exactly the same load that killed the other 8 power plants.
Well that’s a bummer! Any ideas why? Have you been loading it heavily?
The P3 doesn’t even break a sweat carrying the load, so its bigger brothers shouldn’t either. They did work out what was killing the power plants (high input voltages) and there was a design mod to fix the problem. Since higher spec transistors were fitted to the power plants there was only one failure, and that was a P10 (a repaired P10 which failed again after the repair/mod). P3 has been rock solid since the outset…I’m guessing they built what they learned from P5/10 into P3 and hence it has been more reliable.
Wow! Thanks for the warning. I was going to buy one but now–not. There’s so much top notch competition in this field. What keeps you a customer after 8 power plant failures? What a huge investment down the old dumper!!!
What I am suggesting is, any power plant you buy now should be OK because the problem with export units has been fixed. I haven’t bought another P5 or P10 since I bought the P3 because the P3 turned out to be ample for my requirements. PS Audio covered the cost of all parts, and for some of the labor. So I wasn’t out-of-pocket much, certainly not to lose me as a customer, because I like to think I’m a customer-for-life. And my initial investment was only the cost of the power plant premier. PS Audio upgraded me to P5 for free when the PPP failed for a 3rd time, and they upgraded me to a P10 for only $1000 when the P5 failed a 3rd time. So they have looked after me very well.
Thanks for clarifying with that which was quite important to the story!
When a company looks after its customers as well as what PS Audio does, it does result in a strong loyalty to the brand, even despite a few road bumps along the way. I think Paul and his team have understood this for many years.
Brodric,
That’s good info, thanks. Voltage here usually runs about 121; hafta think that’s not high enough to cause a problem, no? I do plan to get the new version of the P10 pretty soon.
121V is no problem whatsoever for a U.S. Power Plant. Plus the issue with which Brodric was unfortunately faced was resolved quite some time ago.
How accurate is the scope on the new line? How much filtering does the scope actually do in terms of seeing what’s really happening? A video of all the features of the P5, P10 and P20 would be awesome! I mean, there’s a video of unboxing so some more technical video would be nice for a prospective customer.
Elk, so I assumed. In any case mine has, as I said, been rock-solid.
jtwrace: I don’t know how often the scope polls the sinewave but it’s pretty often; I can look at mine and see changes sometimes every few seconds.