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!
The sole display either shows the incoming voltage or outgoing.
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.
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:"
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:
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:
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:
I can't see anything. This is at modest power however. Let's perform a full power sweep and see what we get:
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:
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.
-----------
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/
The 1.5Q is not much to look at but boy, does it weigh a ton at 70 pounds!
The sole display either shows the incoming voltage or outgoing.
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.
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:"
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:
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:
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:
I can't see anything. This is at modest power however. Let's perform a full power sweep and see what we get:
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:
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.
-----------
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/
