Just Doing What You Have to Do….

[wkhanna]

You know. Like when you just drop your entire (hidden from The wife) audio Stuff savings on a new DAC and the V same day your power conditioner decides to self destruct.

Yeah, my APC H15 just took a long walk off a short pier. The display read ‘RELAY WELD’ when the power was on & had no output. I took it to our local shop’s ER & stood in the waiting area, tensions eased slightly by the offering of a cold Bass Ale, & waited anxiously for the diagnoses.

Eventually, I was delivered the bad news. Shop technician extraordinaire, Anders, got it to power on, but the power output is at 135v. Not good. Something goofy with voltage regulation & not worth the cost of repair, considering a new unit can be had for ~ $ 200. Problem is, those 2 Benjamin’s are a few paydays away. & of course, like any true OCD audio nerd, I can’t just replace laterally. It Must be an upgrade.

A blessed local associate & true friend has offered to lend use of an Adcom Ace, hope to pick it up within a few days. In the meantime, you do what-cha-gotta-do.





Hence, all the chaos & short term patch work so as to at least be able to have a functioning system for the evening. But here is where it gets interesting. At first, I thought it just a fleeting notion. But I am well into my second hour of focused listening & this is no hallucination. Not a placebo or neuro- induced phenomena. This is real. The music is alive. It is ALIVE. Alive like Shelley’s monster. Awakened from the dead Alive.

Maybe it was like the shock absorbers in a vehicle. They wear so gradually you never notice the miniscule degradation from hour to hour, week to week, month to month. But after a few years they are shot. And you do not realize it till you replace them. And then scratch your head in wonderment of how bad they really were. Maybe the APC was just worn out. Or maybe it took a hit & I just never realized it. Or maybe it has been choking the life out of my system from day one.

All I know is that a couple of extension strips that are normally pulled out during the holidays for tree lights have transformed my system to a height I would never have thought it capable of.

Hey, sometimes……you just do with what cha got. Right?

[wkhanna]

OK.

I just had an epiphany.

With the APC out of the system, so are all those outrageous, hideous, distracting and annoying BLUE – in your face- vision blurring-apocalyptic grade LED’s.

That MUST be it!

[Hdale85]

My display is always turned off lol. Hey how much for the dead one I wish my case was black and since yours is

[wkhanna]

You want a Black chassis, Dougie?
It is yours :W

[Hdale85]

Sweet! Now I have to come to Pittsburgh sometime....lol

[wkhanna]

My good friend Emery’s loaner, an Adcom surge suppressor, arrived yesterday via special courier (thanks Dan!)

It is a great relief to have a decent quality protection device back in my system. I was a bit nervous relying on some generic power strips.

Meanwhile, we have concluded the reason for the failure to be one of two possibilities:

1. With the RB-1090 plugged into the APC H15, the added current draw (up to 5 amps steady state at times) was too much for the APC and consequently due to the constant high stress level the unit eventually failed.

2. There had been some electrical storms in the area the day before the unit first failed to power “ON”. While no other electronic devises in my home failed, the only other sensitive equipment I do have (my NAS / PC Main Tower ominously referred to by The wife as,”the Mothership”) is buffered by a smaller APC BE450G UPS / surge protector. It is V possible that the APC H15 did its intended job. Playing its part as sacrificial lamb the loss of the unit saved the rest of my system. In other words, it just paid for itself nearly a fiftyfold.

Lastly, the visceral difference between having the amp plugged directly into the wall as opposed to filtering/surge/protection devices is V obvious. Speed and dynamics are profoundly affected. It has been while since I last tried the comparison & many changes have been made since then. Some major, some not so big. Whether those changes are responsible for allowing the difference to be noticed, I do not know. I would say that as your system evolves, it is probably a worthwhile endeavor to re-try some previously infective tweaks from time to time. Surely, it never hurts.