The Good:
Top-quality materials and construction; excellent engineering values with some nice user-friendly design touches; one of the few surge protectors that shields equipment with varying power requirements, as well as cable and DSL modems for home theatre setups with Internet connections; specialty cabling can visibly improve picture quality.The Bad:
Price will leave a hole in your wallet.The Verdict:
If you can foot the bill, the Pure/AV line of cables and surge protectors can help you get the cleanest audio and video signals possible from your home theatre gear.
REVIEW:
Cables and surge suppressors are not the kind of thing we usually review at globetechnology.com, but we decided to take a look at a new line from Belkin because it has some interesting features that make it particularly appealing to anyone who has a mix of computers, audio-visual equipment and gaming gear.
Belkin is a specialist in computer-related equipment, but recognizing the trend towards "connected homes," it's making a big push into the audio-video market with a new brand called Pure/AV.
I checked out the company's new Pure/AV Isolator Home Theater Surge Protector. Right off the top, surge suppression gear is devilishly difficult to test - you need a major lab full of specialized voltage-measuring equipment, the ability to accurately simulate brownouts and lightning strikes, and so on. Needless to say, I'm not set up to test the electrical performance of the Pure/AV line in, say, the equivalent of a full-scale electrical storm. So I'm putting faith in Belkin's official test ratings and the results of the government certifications the products had to pass in order to reach the market.
I feel confident doing this, though, because Belkin has a warranty of up to $300,000 (U.S.) covering equipment connected to the Pure/AV Isolator Home Theater Surge Protector. If your gear is damaged because the Isolator doesn't do its job properly, you get cash to buy yourself a new home theatre setup. That's a pretty sweet insurance policy.
Instead of an in-depth technical evaluation of the product's surge suppression capabilities, I'm going to concentrate on the features. And believe me, this isn't anything like the $10 power strips from the local hardware store. The Pure/AV Isolator Home Theater Surge Protector will cost you around $150 (U.S.).
So why would anyone in their right mind drop that much cash on a high-tech power bar? Well, the answer lies in how much you value your home's electronic equipment, and how pure you want your audio and video playback to be.
The Isolator has features you'd usually find on a high-end power suppressor for delicate computer hardware. But it's built for people with large audio-video and gaming setups - and for the type of people who look for a "THX"-type logo on their A/V equipment.
Belkin has done a good job both on the guts of the Isolator according to the certification test numbers and specs. The Isolator has six 130V metal-oxide varistors (MOVs) rated at 4,720 Joules (broken down, that's H-N 2,950 Joules, H-G 885 Joules, and N-G 885 Joules). The maximum spike current it's built to handle is 240,000 Amps (again, broken down that's H-N 150,000A, H-G 45,000A, and N-G 45,000A).
The UL clamping voltage for all lines is 330 volts, and the Isolator's response time to a surge is under one nanosecond - less than one-billionth of a second. As a last line of defence, it also has thermal fuses that will kick in and disconnect the power to devices if the surge protection fails for any reason.
These are great numbers for a surge suppressor - as I said, they compare to what you'd find on a good desktop computer or server power conditioner. But since it's meant for audio-visual systems, the Isolator goes further than mere surge protection.
Each power line in the Isolator has iron core chokes, which filter out electrical noise from AC connections. Added to this is a set of differential isolation coils to soften small electrical spikes and line noise, and high-frequency capacitors to cut electro-magnetic and radio-frequency interference (they're rated at greater than 80 dB at 1 MHz).
