There are at least 3 reasons to have a good home theater line conditioner: Surge Protection, Improved Picture/Sound (line filtering), and Power On Sequencing. Do not assume your picture or sound cannot be improved over it’s current state!

Panamax products WILL protect your system, and they are guaranteed by Panamax to do so. Power Protection and Surge Suppression should not be taken lightly! There are all sorts of claims out there about various technologies being better or worse for surge protection. In reality, proper surge protection is a little more complex than that. No one technology should be considered the best for all circumstances. The Panamax surge protection devices we sell are proven products, with a long history of successful protection, even if you need lightning surge protection. Panamax Surge Suppressors carry a protected equipment warranty. In other words, they are *guaranteed* to protect by the manufacturer! No hype and fancy talk, just real surge protection with proven technologies, even home theater surge protection. Power protectors use a hybrid technology, combining the best technologies for the ultimate in protection. This gives you the best surge protector available!

We are a trained dealer of Panamax products. The surge protector products sold for home theater need to be carefully hooked up, improper hookup is bad for your equipment and voids your warranty. Please contact us after you purchase your items so we can help you to properly hook up your equipment. We have found approximately 1 out of 3 people hook up their equipment improperly, putting them at increased risk to suffer damage.

Reasons why surge protector products are better:

WARRANTY

Panamax warrants their units and the equipment connected to them, if you buy from an authorized dealer. While this may seem like a minor concern according to some web sites, think about it. If they were not confident their equipment works, they would not warrant connected equipment. But they do. Also, with over 3 million sold, clearly, they wouldn’t be selling them any more if they did not work as they would be paying more and more claims every year as the installed base grew.

HYBRID DESIGN

Panamax Power surge protectors use a hybrid design, using various technologies which when combined offer the best possible surge protection. If you are thinking series mode protector, think again, they use a coil, and coils pass voltage through during prolonged surges.

PROTECTION FOR ALL PATHS

No surge protection technology can possibly work unless all signal paths coming into and out of your system are protected. Some competing brands actually sell units that have AC only protection! They are useless unless you protect all paths.

RESPONSE TIME

Panamax surge proectors have a response time of less than 1 nanosecond. This is critical in protecting from surges! If you have a UPS or are considering one, please note that most of them provide a 5NS response time, this is NOT good. Also, a question to ask if you are considering a UPS is does it protect all the signal paths? Also, please be aware that UPSs add LOTS of noise to an audio/video system, you will greatly reduce the quality of your system with a UPS.

PROTECTION and “Series Mode”

What about series mode surge protection? Series mode protection by itself is good, but has some weaknesses. One major weakness is that common mode impulses generated by in house surges or other types of surges are unprotected by a series mode surge protector, bet they didn’t tell you that. Or, maybe they said they do not occur or are not large enough to cause any damage? The UL1449 spec they like to quote *requires* a common mode surge test, why would they have the test if it was not important? Panamax Power surge protectors protect against common mode surges. Also, series mode proponents claim that other protectors have short lifetimes, while theirs does not. The manufacturer of the components used for AC protection rates their product as having a lifetime of 500 years if you had a direct hit by lightning on your power feed once per year (IEEE 500 amp test pulse). Or, you could easily handle 100,000 100 amp surges. Another claim is that Panamax Power surge protectors shunt all surges to ground. Not so! Surges are diverted to neutral and ground, making all 3 phases have the same potential, meaning no downstream damage, unlike the claims. Also, they claim that mode 2 protectors inflate by massive factors the ground reference, we can direct you to sources in the power industry that says this can happen without any mode 2 protector, the case is vastly overstated, and since they do not protect against those types of surges… Series mode protectors really do NOT pass the UL1449 rating as that requires passing the mode 2 protection test, it is part of the UL1449 spec. They get out of it by not having any surge protection except for hot-neutral, and therefore there is nothing to test, all semantics. Which means other types of surges are *completely* unprotected. Ask them what happens during a prolonged surge, as in 10 seconds, or minutes say during a storm. Also, if the surge exceeds their rated capacity, any coil design gets overloaded, and overloaded coils pass through the voltage. If they tell you you cannot possibly get a surge in excess of 6,000 volts, wrong again. Finally, most of the ones we’ve seen do NOT guarantee they will protect your system, Panamax does!

You can also get additional information from the Panamax Surge Protection.

This is a great article by www.powersystemsdirect.com/

Ask Ron About Panamax Surge Protection

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Panamax Model numbers: M5400-PMM, M5300-PM, M5100-PM, M4300-PM, M7500-PRO, M1500-UPS-PFP, M5510-PRO, M5500-EX, M5400-EX, M5300-EX, M5100-EX, M4300-EX, M4400-20A, RM-8, ML4200, M4315-PRO, M4320-PRO, M8-HT-PRO, M8-HT, M10-HT-PRO, MFP-400, MFP-300, PM8-HT, P8-AV, MIP-15A-EX, MIP-20-EX, M4-EX, M4T-EX, M8C-EX, M8DBS-EX, M8-EX, M8T-EX, M8C-PRO, M8HC-PRO, MFP500-EX, PM8C-EX, PM8DBS-EX, PM8T-EX, PM8-EX, PM8-GAV, B1500, MB850, MB1000, MIW-POWERKIT-PRO, MIW-XT , MIW-SURGE, MIW-POWER-PRO-PFP, MIW-POWER-PRO, MIW-DUAL SIGNAL BAY, MIW-5RCA, MIW-DATA, MIW-SVIDEO, MIW-VGA, MIW-POWERKIT-TL, MIW-POWERKIT-MOB, MIW-POWER-3BAY, MIW-B&O, MIW-POWER, MOD-AT2, MOD-AT4, MOD-AT8110, MOD-CAT5, MOD-DBSTV, MOD-DT4, MOD-SPKP, MOD-UTP, M7500CRD-IP, D10-PFP, M2, M2A20, M2AV, M2T, M2SUB, GPP8005, SEP-200, M2DF, BEZ7500-PRO-S, BEZ4300-EX, BEZ5100-EX, BEZ5300-EX, BEZ5400-EX, BEZ5500-EX, BEZ5510-PRO-S monster cable, panamax m4300pm, panamax m4300pm, Panamax MX5102

]]> http://asktheadvisors.com/panamax/feed/ 1 http://asktheadvisors.com/ask-ron-in-retail/ http://asktheadvisors.com/ask-ron-in-retail/#comments Wed, 11 Feb 2009 17:37:46 +0000 ceuart http://notjustaudioadvisors.com/?p=1251

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It has come to my attention on an almost daily basis here in the store that there is a lot of confusion about a few of the terms Television manufacturers like to use to describe their displays; so I am going to try to de-mystify a few of the big ones right now. I think the biggest area of confusion at the moment is in the types of LCD displays being sold so let’s start there.

There are 5 main types of LCD displays to be aware of.

CCFL Backlight LCD

This is the traditional LCD display which uses (for lack of a better term) fluorescent tubes of some type as the light source. These have been around the longest, use the most energy and as a rule would now be considered the lowest performing of the types available. The main reason to look at this type of display will probably be cost. These should be the least expensive of the 5 types I am going to discuss here. The only place where this will not hold true is in the very largest sizes. So far I am not aware of anyone making anything larger than about 55″ which uses any of the other forms of backlight. So if you are shopping 60″ and above a CCFL display is probably in your future if you are looking for a set that is 55″ and smaller, keep reading.

Edge Light White LED Backlight LCD

This is the next step in LCD display lighting. The primary advantages are that the LED’s provide a very long life light source and the set can be extremely thin in fact the Samsung sets that are built this way are only 1.2″ thick! These sets are also more energy efficient than the previously mentioned CCFL sets. The downside to these sets is that they do not have the best uniformity of light. Because all of the light comes from the edges of the screen and are dispersed via some sort of diffraction system they can have darker or lighter areas in the picture. This is the display of choice when thickness is your main concern because these are going to be the thinnest displays you will see.

Full Array or Full Panel White LED Backlight LCD

This type of display also uses LED’s for the light but in this case the LED’s are placed directly behind the LCD panel and are distributed all across the back of the panel. This type of set gives you all of the advantages of LCD very white light for better color accuracy, extremely low energy usage, extremely long life of the light source, and because the LED’s are across the entire panel they have excellent light uniformity. Believe it or not, even though these have many more LCD’s than an edge lighted design; they are more energy efficient because the LED’s can be run at a lower level. In fact the Sharp 52″ Full Array LCD display uses and average of about 105 watts or about the same amount of energy as an incandescent light bulb. This is the display for great color and for the Green among you because of its’ extreme energy efficiency.

Full Array or Full Panel White LED Backlight LCD with Local Dimming

This is really the same as the display just covered in number 3 with one big difference. Local Dimming control means that these sets can turn the LED arrays on and off independently in different areas of the display. This allows the display to have better black levels and handle locally bright areas even better. Just think about watching a movie with a lot of action in very dark situations and the advantages of this type of display will become apparent. This is going to be the best performing of all of the White LED displays, and will be the most costly because of the extra control needed to handle the local dimming.

Full Array or Full Panel Tri-Luminous LED Backlight LCD w/Local Dimming

Wow, what a mouthful that is. This is the best of everything with all of the picture and performance enhancements mentioned above plus instead of White LED’s it uses Red-Green and Blue LED’s. So we have local dimming, energy efficiency, and with 3 color LED’s we have the very best in color levels and accuracy. This will be the most expensive of all of the LCD display types because it requires the most sophisticated control system. This will be the LCD display panel for the most discriminating TV buyer.

Please remember this is an overview and I am not trying to cover every aspect of every design from every manufacturer it is just a primer of the main types of displays you will hear people discussing. Plus if for some reason you do accidentally go to one of the Big Buy stores after reading this you will probably already know more than the helpful part time high school student that will be there to try to ignore you until you give up and buy something. And remember, we guarantee our TV prices so you can come to Ask the Advisors, talk to someone who knows what they are talking about, get good advice on what display fits your needs, buy it at the same price as the “discount store” and not have to deal with the hassles associated with buying at a Big Buy type of store….. Ron

Ask Ron About LCD Televisions

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