EquiTech 1.5RQ Balanced Power Review

[Labjr]

What is the safety risk of having balanced power?

 

[Xulonn]

What is the safety risk of having balanced power?

This has already discussed in this thread...

 

[Billy Budapest]

Zero Surge and SurgeX use similar technology and you wouldn’t go wrong with either.

 

[VintageFlanker]

Did somebody even noticed this:

"Used by Elton John, Neil Young, Stevie Wonder, Norah Jones, Herbie Hancock, Bob Dylan, Aerosmith, Steely Dan, Lenny Kravitz & Many More! "

https://elusivedisc.com/equi-tech-1-5rq-power-conditioner/

Seriously ?!

 

[calugg]

I have a stupid question: Why not spend the money and put a surge suppressor on your MAIN electrical box, basically protecting everything in your home??? Any competent electrician can do this, and you'd be up to code--since they are licensed. Am I missing something?

 

[RayDunzl]

I guarantee you they are not. Studios don't bother with this stuff.

I bought mine from a studio.

They were upgrading from individual rack mounts to a whole house system.

Dishonest company. Add that to my "never" list...

Read @Francis Vaughan comments.

Nearly 5K for a transformer is absurd

No, I didn't spend $5000.

---

Audio Buddy brought over an old crossover (that we used in the band back in 1981 or so).

It hummed plugged into the wall, same outlet as the rest of the gear here.

It was quiet (other than the old op-amps) when plugged into the rack power.

He has an old PSAudio Power Plant - the something 300 model.

It provides (regenerated) balanced power, just for the record, but is limited to 300W or so.

What is the safety risk of having balanced power?

If you have some piece of gear that has the case bonded to the Neutral (usually 0V) you now have 60VAC on the case, or if the metal case "somehow" touches neutral in the future.

It warns not to have "lights" plugged into it.

None of my gear shows a voltage on the case.

---

Bottom line, as with anything else (tweaky or not):

If you want one, get one, if not, don't.

I saw one cheap, and bought it, years ago.

It doesn't get hot.

It sits under the preamp and between the monoblocks, raising the top of the preamp to the same height as the power amps, and, in that respect, it really ties the room together.

There's a potential draw maybe 3500W plugged into it (hungry Krell stuff along with everything else in the rack). The breaker in the garage will open far below that).

 

[Cuniberti]

Zero Surge and SurgeX use similar technology and you wouldn’t go wrong with either.

UGH, you are confusing filtering with balanced power - totally different applications.

 

[Billy Budapest]

UGH, you are confusing filtering with balanced power - totally different applications.

No, I am not confused—a forum member asked what surge suppression technology he should use and I answered.

Another company that uses similar technology to SurgeX and Zero Surge is Brick Wall:

https://www.brickwall.com

 

[Cuniberti]

No, I am not confused—a forum member asked what surge suppression technology he should use, and I answered.

Another company that uses similar technology to SurgeX and Zero Surge is Brick Wall:

https://www.brickwall.com

sorry, you didn't add their quote so I had no idea you were answering a question.

 

[RayDunzl]

List of some other fools who may have or had interest in the Equitech gear:

https://equitech.com/clients/

Somebody wanna call up LIGO and argue Snake Oil?

 

[dorirod]

SurgeX—no BS claims about sound quality and doesn’t use sacrificial MOVs:

https://www.ametekesp.com/surgex

Not talking about any quality of power, but in general what is the deal with not using MOVs (why are they bad)? I have this installed on my main panel (would only help with really high voltage spikes):
http://www.intermatic.com/en/Surge-Protection/Whole-House-Surge/IG1240RC3
No idea how much protection it offers, but I figured better than nothing, and it's not that expensive to put on or replace if it gets damaged.

 

[m8o]

These are the same people who hear differences in power cords and audiophile fuses, I bet.

To the general crowd...
I wonder if these people can hear the difference between the power limiting lightbulbs JBL uses in its speakers when they source it from different suppliers.

( In case any reader's sarcams director's batteries are dead, that's sarcasm lol )

On a more serious note, I always hope power distribution units with active components "do something". Its always disappointing when they do not. Has there ever been one found that does, actually?

 

[Cuniberti]

List of some other fools who may have or had interest in the Equitech gear:

https://equitech.com/clients/

Equitech balanced power units are in hundreds top recording/mastering studios including mine. They are used for BALANCED POWER NOT FILTERING! They eliminate ground loops that are very common in recording studios with dozens of power sources and a shit load of gear.

 

[Xulonn]

Equitech balanced power units are in hundreds top recording/mastering studios including mine. They are used for BALANCED POWER NOT FILTERING! They eliminate ground loops that are very common in recording studios with dozens of power sources and a shit load of gear.

Well and concisely stated! As a pro, you need to consider that there are many, many visitors and members here at ASR with low levels of techno-knowledge. Many of them blather on without doing any research - or often not reading the whole thread - before they ask questions that have already been answered. How many times has it been said in this thread that this is not a filtering device, yet posts/replies keep popping up repeatedly about filtering/surge suppression. Personally, I learned a lot from out resident experts about the usefulness of this product in preventing grounding issues at studios with many, many audio electronic devices, but I still wonder why it costs so much.

(My earlier snake-oil post is about Equitech's marketing to audiophiles for home use, not that the unit does not function as designed.)

 

[Cuniberti]

Well and concisely stated! As a pro, you need to consider that there are many, many visitors and members here at ASR with low levels of techno-knowledge. Many of them blather on without doing any research - or often not reading the whole thread - before they ask questions that have already been answered. How many times has it been said in this thread that this is not a filtering device, yet posts/replies keep popping up repeatedly about filtering/surge suppression. Personally, I earned a lot from out resident experts about the usefulness of this product in preventing grounding issues at studios with many, many audio electronic devices, but I still wonder why it costs so much.

(My earlier snake-oil post is about Equitech's marketing to audiophiles for home use, not that the unit does not function as designed.)

I think the review was misguided and focused on bs filtering claims and not the benefits of balanced power. I wrote to Amir and pointing this out to him. Funny thing is, we know balanced power works so no need for a review anyway.

 

[Kachda]

This is a review and detailed measurements of the EquiTech 1.5RQ (also called 1.5Q) Balanced Mains Power. It is on kind loan from a member and costs US $4,700.

The 1.5Q is not much to look at but boy, does it weigh a ton at 70 pounds!

View attachment 140956

The sole display either shows the incoming voltage or outgoing.
View attachment 140957

Balanced power takes a 120 volt RMS incoming feed and produces two out of phase 60 volt feeds which gives you the same differential 120 volt. This is said to do all kinds of things from reducing noise to making your music sound better. From the company:

"If you haven’t heard your sound system with a Model Q powering it, you are missing something truly great. You might just find yourself replaying all of your old music again and again as if hearing it for the first time with a new appreciation for detail, clarity and remarkable bass definition that you have never experienced before. Many of our customers have told us that their Model Q was the one component above all others in their system that accounted for the biggest difference in sonic quality. Source components and amplifiers benefit equally from their use. "

Important Note: in US, national electric code (NEC, article 647) disallows use of balanced power in residential use. It is only allowed in commercial installations where they assume proper power distribution and labeling of outlets is used to warn improper use. With the chassis of the equipment now potentially flowing up to 60 volts, risk of electric shock or worse is there.

I know a lot of audiophiles buy products like this, or have the fixed version attached to their service entrance and such. But that doesn't excuse the inherent risks involved.

Equitech 1.5RQ Measurements
Before we look at what a power improvement product does, we need to quantify the incoming power which varies from location to location. To do this, I used a high-voltage differential probe to cleanly sample the AC mains and bring its voltage down to a safe manner to analyze with my Audio Precision.

NOTE: Do not attempt to do this on your own unless you fully understand what you are doing. Improver connection to mains using sound cards and such could have catastrophic consequences to you and your equipment. I have take special precautions here and even so, this is dangerous work.

View attachment 140958

As I have shown before, my AC mains is not some ideal perfect sine wave. Yours is likely similar. We see the waveform itself is visibly distorted on top left due to high levels of distortion. FFT spectrum shows the nature of the distortions added to it.

My differential probe divides the incoming voltage by 100 so multiply the voltages by that as you read them and as I have annotated. We have 122 volt RMS or 168 volt peak.

Now let's do the same but route the power through EquiTech 1.5RQ and sample its "digital outlets:"
View attachment 140959

With one minor exception, nothing has changed. Same high distortion of nearly 9% with tons of harmonics and noise in the audible band. There is a reduction of 120 Hz harmonic however but that amplitude ws quite small to start with. Our sine wave is still visibly distorted.

Maybe the improvements are higher frequencies. So let's expand the measurement bandwidth to 1 MHz and see what we get:

View attachment 140962

Nothing. Everything is as bad as without 1.5Q.

Since we never listen to the AC mains (!), let's hook up an amplifier and measure its output. I decided to use my Purifi reference design amplifier for this purpose. Let's pull up its dashboard using straight mains AC power:

View attachment 140960

We see the excellent measurements we have come to love about this amplifier. Now let's route its AC mains through Equitech 1.5Q and see if there is any improvement:

View attachment 140961

I can't see anything. This is at modest power however. Let's perform a full power sweep and see what we get:

View attachment 140963

Ah, performance actually degrades a bit with 1.5RQ! I repeated the measurements with and without it and the results are exactly as you see.

Company talks about better power factor. What is power factor? Ideally your load would consume current at proportional to voltage. That is, the two are in sync. That only happens for a resistive load (e.g. a traditional light bulb). Many electronic devices we have use current out of phase with voltage. Resistive loads produce a power factor of 1.0. Anything else is a reduction and makes it harder for the power company to deliver energy to you. Let's measure the Purifi amp's power factor and efficiency of the 1.5Q:

View attachment 140964

As we see, the power factor by itself is quite poor at 0.38. There are switching power supplies with power factor correction. The hypex one that Purifi is using is not one of them. EquiTech 1.5 improves this to 58%.

On the down side, there are losses due to the transformers in this box. Power consumption goes up to the tune of 31%. So the box gives you one thing, and takes back another.

Note that in US you don't get any benefit from using your power with 1.0 power factor in residential setting. In commercial installations however, you could get charged extra for low power factor.

Conclusions
Unlike many power tweaks, the Equitech 1.5RQ does what it says: it delivers balanced/differential power to your equipment. Beyond that, lots of claims are made that simply are not objective. Our audio equipment doesn't feed AC mains to our speakers/headphones. Power is always converted to DC with lots of filtering before use. For this reason as you see, there is no improvement to be had. And at any rate, this box doesn't even clean up the AC signal in any significant way.

Needless to say, I can't recommend the EquiTech 1.5RQ balanced power. It does what it says it does but you don't need it. And certainly not at this kind of price.

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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.

Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/

I feel bad for the person who paid close to 5k for this if it was for the intent of any power filtering

 

[3125b]

I think the review was misguided and focused on bs filtering claims and not the benefits of balanced power

I disagree, it makes sense to focus on the nonsensical claims the company is making to sell this expensive product to people who have no need for it in the first place to rake in extra cash using maybe legally and certainly morally questionable tricks.
Antibiotics legitimately work to combat bacterial infections, but selling them as a cure for cancer would be fraudulent.

 

[Cuniberti]

I disagree, it makes sense to focus on the nonsensical claims the company is making to sell this expensive product to people who have no need for it in the first place to rake in extra cash using maybe legally and certainly morally questionable tricks.
Antibiotics legitimately work to combat bacterial infections, but selling them as a cure for cancer would be fraudulent.

LOL, more like it's a cure for cancer but failed to protect you from the flu.

 

[Geert]

So we can conclude they need to keep their marketing department in check. Not the only company struggling with this.

 

[fordiebianco]

It is an interesting point, I suspect the answer lies with your particular supply quality. I have never checked mine, I am a bit squeamish about sticking my oscilloscope across the mains, even in differential mode with the correct probes! So I have never checked it at any of the places I have lived and I have never applied any filtering, protection or isolation transformers.

I believe, the IET, BS7671, (the UK wiring standards) since 2018 require for all new installations (not retrospectively applied) that unless a risk assessment is carried out, protection against transient overvoltage shall be provided where the consequence caused by overvoltage could: (followed by a list bad things that might happen). The previous standard allowed an exemption for some domestic dwellings. My Home was built in 2017 and does not include transient overvoltage protection/suppression.

In commercial installations, we have been including such protection for more than 25 years as a matter of course.

So I suppose based on the 'direction of travel' the authorities think it is a good idea and probably should be installed on all new build or rewired UK domestic dwellings. No mention of isolation transformers though, thank goodness!

Thank you for the comprehensive reply. Is that a 'yes' to surge protectors or power filters (I live rurally in a 50 year old house).