Furman Elite-16 Power Factor E I
Not all power is created equal, but with the latest power conditioner from Furman, it can be cleaned especially for home entertainment solutions. Stephen Dawson writes.
Mains power can be a problem. It can inject noise into an inadequately designed audio system, and it can introduce high voltage, high current spikes which can destroy even the best of audio systems.
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This is where a power conditioner comes in. It deals with those problems. The Furman Elite-16 Power Factor E i power conditioner is one such. And even though Furman is a North American brand (albeit ultimately owned by the Italian company Nice), this model is designed specifically for 230V power systems, such as ours.
What is it?
A power conditioner plugs into a wall socket and then provides power in an improved form via one or more mains power outlets. Obviously, the whole point of it is to improve the power along the way, and we’ll get into what those improvements are under the various “problem” headings below.
Meanwhile, the Furman Elite-16 Power Factor E i power conditioner is physically a standard-component width box, 432mm wide, 102mm tall and 375mm deep. On the front is a large blue rectangular LED. It’s on as long as the power is on. At the extreme right is a large, hardwired rocker switch for that power. A little to the switch’s left is another smaller LED labelled “Extreme Voltage”. It illuminates when that condition is detected, something that did not happen while the unit was with me. Thankfully this is a rare circumstance, during which the Furman Elite would be supremely useful.
There are also two of what look like control knobs, but they aren’t. They are actually the front ends of utility lights. Pull one of them out and a light on its underside illuminates. It switches on after just a millimetre or two, and the whole thing can extend out 94mm. They cast the light downwards and can swivel by perhaps 20°. A smaller real knob to their left can be turned to adjust their brightness. These don’t really do anything with regard to the unit’s core functions but are simply an additional convenience.
At the back, you have all the connections along with two circuit breaker buttons. The hefty mains power inlet uses a C20 power socket. The unit is provided with a power cord with the matching C19 plug.
Next to that are eight F-type coaxial sockets, four inputs and four outputs. These are for protecting equipment from electrical spikes and surges. Labelled for cable and satellite connections, I didn’t have any appropriate equipment to test them with. But since they are only for surges, the chances that I’d “enjoy” such a chance were minimal anyway. Furman rates their insertion loss at less than 0.5dB at 2GHz, which means that there should be no significant loss.
The rest of the connections are all power outputs, arranged in three groups of four. One group is for high-current applications – amplifiers, subwoofers and the like. One group is for lower current demand devices such as (Furman suggests) turntables, audio preamplifiers, CD players and the like. The third group is the same as the second group, except with additional high-frequency filtering for noise that might interfere with video components.
The problem – noise
Before we dig too deeply into this unit, it’s worth considering why such a device might be justified. Is our mains power supply actually impure?
Well, yes it is. And in totally unpredictable ways which vary from house to house, area to area. I’ve previously written about how ridiculous super expensive power leads are; those which for just a few hundred (or even, a few thousand) dollars purport to somehow improve the sound of your system by somehow improving the delivery of power from the wall socket to your equipment. To the extent that there is any rationality in them, they seemed to be based on the assumption that the wall socket is delivering a pure, undistorted, unadulterated 50Hz sine wave, which might somehow be damaged by a deficient cable.
Well, it doesn’t.
With only a handful of ohms resistance in the way, your wall socket is connected to every electrical device or appliance plugged into every other switched-on wall socket in your home. That would no doubt include several switch-mode power supplies of various sizes, a refrigerator, lights including, possibly, fluorescent tubes and CFCs and LEDs, and who knows what else.
But that’s not all.
Again, with not too many ohms, your wall socket is also directly connected to every house sharing the same single-phase output from the local pole-mounted 11kV transformer. That could well be scores of homes, so your wall socket is also connected to their washing machines and the chargers for their electric scooters and so on.
So, the power supplied by your wall socket is, to put it bluntly, a mess. Figure 1 shows the voltage provided by mine. It looks like a clipped sine wave, which means that it’s full of harmonics, particularly odd-order ones.
Figure 2 shows the frequency spectrum of that voltage. As you can see, there are all those harmonic peaks, some as high as only 20dB below the 50Hz that we actually want. Also, you can see the noise floor.
So, yes, there really is a problem to clean up.
The Furman Elite has “Linear Filtering” built in to actively clean up the power coming in from your wall socket. This filtering doesn’t seem to be designed to remove those harmonic distortion products, which are unlikely to affect equipment performance in any case. It seems to be engineered principally to remove high-frequency noise, which is often generated through the mains by all those homes’ switching power supplies, refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners and the like which both draw significant amounts of power and switch on and off abruptly.
Thus, the noise attenuation rating starts at 40kHz, although since it is at -40dB at that point, there is still significant noise reduction at lower frequencies. Above 100kHz, the noise reduction is specified at 80dB.
The other problem – spikes and power errors
It is rare, but sometimes your electrical utility might provide a higher voltage than it ought to. This can be an overvoltage extending over some time, or one or more voltage spikes, perhaps produced by a lightning strike.
Neither of these is an issue principally about sound quality, but about equipment protection.
With regard to overvoltage, the unit monitors the incoming voltage and if it goes beyond 275V (compared to the expected 230V), it lights up that front panel “Extreme Voltage” LED and switches off the outlets, saving your equipment. Switch the unit off and then back on again (after checking to make sure that the problem has been resolved) and you’re back in action.
When it comes to surges and spikes, Furman employs what it calls Series Multi-Stage Protection. This is “non-sacrificial”. Many surge protection devices are lower in cost but are typically designed to die themselves when encountering a surge or spike, thus saving the connected equipment. The nice thing about the Furman Elite is that it provides this protection without damage. When the thunderstorm stops, you can just proceed as normal without having to replace anything.
If a spike or surge strikes, the unit clamps the output voltage at 376V in the face of spikes up to an incredible 6,000V and 3,000A.
A third problem – insufficient power
The four high current outputs add an additional feature, which Furman calls Power Factor Technology. Above I talked about the few ohms separating your power outlet from all the others. But, except for the problem of those other pesky devices attached to the power line, the ideal for something like a power amplifier would be zero ohms on the power line. Thus the amp could draw as much power as required from instant to instant with no effect upon the input voltage.
In real life, though, a greater draw drops the incoming voltage. And would also drop the voltage for all the other devices plugged into the same power distribution unit.
Furman’s Power Factor Technology provides a power bank, as it were, that can deliver short term burst of power – up to 80A it says in one of its documents – in effective reducing the apparent mains impedance as it appears to the amplifier.
So, this stops those demands affecting other equipment, while potentially reducing momentary output limitations in a power amplifier.
Setting up
In one sense, setting up is straightforward: just plug it in, and then plug all your equipment into the appropriate power sockets on the back. But things are a bit more complicated than that.
First, Furman strongly recommends the use of a 16A power outlet. Standard Australian outlets are 10A. Furman warns of “nuisance tripping at the circuit breaker panel” if too much current is drawn from a regular power socket. You can get an upgraded outlet, but it should be on its own circuit, not shared like regular ones. So, for the full benefit, factor in an electrician.
Also, all the power outlet sockets are female C13 types. So, if you are using equipment that has a fixed power cable, you’ll need to change the plug type. Most likely your equipment will use the male C13 type socket, so for those items you’ll need to purchase C13 to C13 cables.
In use
As it happens, I don’t have a 16A power output so I made do with a regular 10A one. I was comfortable with that because the total load of my devices amounted to, at maximum, perhaps a thousand watts… and that included a very high-powered stereo power amplifier. So even with the power amp going hard, they didn’t challenge the 2,400W limitation of the 10A outlet. And indeed, over a few weeks, the Furman Elite provided all the power the system required with no interruption.
The sound from my system remained excellent. The performance of my UltraHD OLED TV with UHD Blu-ray discs was superb.
But did it make things better than they’d been? I can’t say that I noticed a clear difference. I used two systems, one with around $20,000 in electronics and the other with around $40,000. And both, as I say, performed superbly while protected by the Furman Elite power conditioner.
The problem here is that electronics at this level have pretty good power supplies. They may offer some protection from dangerous nasties coming down the line, but they are pretty good at extracting clean power from the source to deliver to their internal workings.
I would have loved to use the Furman Elite with some of the stuff I used to review fairly often, particularly gear involved in home theatre. Even quite expensive home theatre receivers are a bit on the edge in terms of their power supplies, frequently delivering, with all channels running, many tens of watts fewer than their headline specifications. I suspect that adding the Furman Elite to a system based on one of these, with it feeding the UHD BD player and the projector and the multichannel receiver and the subwoofer, especially if connected to a proper 16A power circuit, would provide clear audible, and maybe even visual, benefits.
And the protection was welcome. There weren’t any adverse effects during my time with the Furman Elite power conditioner, so obviously I can’t really report on how well that worked. I think we’ll just have to go on reputation there. Furman has been around for quite a while and works both in the consumer of professional spheres. It’s unlikely to have lasted if the protection proved inadequate.
Conclusion
Remember, the Furman Elite-16 Power Factor E i power conditioner is not just some fancy protective power board. It also conditions the almost always noisy power from your wall socket and provides protection that will let you get back in operation almost instantly, should the demon lightning strike.
And in addition, it should provide audible improvements in many home theatre systems and lower-level high-fidelity audio systems.
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