Electricity quality, does it matter?

[scarleton]

My background: 16+ years as a very anal software developer. For those of you that don't know, software developers spend most of our time thinking about and resolving how things can go wrong, fore as we know, they always do...

One of those things I am anal about with my personal computers, which I have too many of, is using the more expensive Line Interactive UPS. The reason is they "normally fitted with circuitry to filter out noise and spikes, and to regulate the power output, providing additional power during brownouts and curtailing output during surges."

As I stated in a post earlier today, I am working out the work flow to produce a high quality recording of our sermon's. One thing is for sure, the Solid State Recorder/Player will be a rack mounted unit. Would having the Solid State Recorder/Player hooked to a Line Interactive UPS aid in this efforts to get a clean recording or am I simply being anal?

Sam

[waynehoskins]

INTJ probably? Me too, it goes with the territory.

I think it's overkill. If power cleanness matters to a device, it probably has a well-filtered, or even regulated, power supply. The only problems that doesn't address are excessively low line voltage (brownout, either occasional or perpetual, and if it were perpetual you'd know it by now) and outage. If there is brownout or blackout, to be of any use, everything affected would have to be on such a UPS -- console, receivers, outboard processing. It wouldn't be a bad thing to protect against, but if that happened, the recorder dropping out wouldn't be my first concern.

For sound quality, it doesn't really make much difference, since power supplies have to have pretty good filtering to get good DC from AC. Studio guys might can hear a difference, but I can't.

I'd be more interested in the audio chain between mic and recorder.

Edit: Found the other thread about the recording process. I've got a couple of ideas to put there.

[cmchamp]

Yes, clean power is important, and necessary... what Wayne said about the PSU's of the individual devices.
On another note, I sang an outdoor gig last month. The picnic shelter had 2 15a circuits. I used one, the other was used by the crock-pots. Needless to say, though the power was registering 120v at my rack, my speaker processor would not function properly after power up. So, I bypassed it. Probably a bit overkill for 50 ppl anyway.
C.

[Brad Weber]

Personally, for any significantly sized or mission critical installs I only specify true sine wave, online or double conversion UPSs in conjunction with series mode surge suppression and anything with a processor, format conversion, clock generator, etc. gets that treatment. But that is not for the filtering as much as it is to have a stable, glitch free, reliable power source and a system that you can count on to work (or at least allow a proper shutdown).

[pdc]

Ask any industrial electrician how long motors and control systems work with electricity that is dirty (has lots of harmonics, or is not a true 60 cycles). Clean power is VERY important. Call and speak with the designers and manufacturers of all of these modern power amps. Peavey sent Marty McCann around for about a year with a power supply and IPR amps, proving they can work, but with clean power. All of these modern amps need consistent and clean power or they will not deliver full output, or clean output. Computers, digital to analog converters, etc need clean power. Video projectors need clean power. The list goes on.

The power companies have the technology to deliver perfectly clean 60 cycle power, but it is not in their best interest. They would loose money doing that. I have a couple of electrical engineer friends in the power business. One of them has some wild patents for this, but his concepts have been rejected and he was threatened with his job if he tried to improve things.