PS Audio's AV Power Center 5000 |
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| How you can do it yourself |
| Intoduction January 2011 |
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First of all, if you're looking for a highly technical review you're at the wrong place. Technical reviews tend to be tough reading. Engineer's can take a two minute explanation of anything and turn it into a five page incomprehensable dissertation. I suppose in their world that would be referred to as thorough. This review is geared towards the hands-on end-user. AKA, the diy home owner . I'll try to keep this overview the way I like it... simple. The purpose of a home theater power and line conditioner is to protect and improve your power quality to your electronic equipment. The intention is to deliver the proper voltage level so your electrical equipment functions properly (noise suppression, transient impulse protection and so on.). In other words, it cleans up the dirty power and it provides a smooth and consistent flow of voltage. That improvement translates to a highly improved audio and video signal. They also diminish the likelihood of damage from electrical spikes. When it come to power conditioners, you get what you pay for. *Note: Installation is straight forward and pretty darn easy. |
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| Power Conditioners | ||||
| Below is the PS Audio AV Power Center 5000 conected to the PowerPack 1500. As seen, the system is in standby mode. The Power Center 5000 is similar to the PowerPlay 9000. The main difference between the two is Internet controllability. The PowerPlay 9000 can be monitored and controlled off site via the Internet by the installer or the customer. You'll always know the status of your AC power quality. It's a really cool feature however, an expensive one. The PowerPlay 9000 retails for $1499.99. The Power Center 5000 lacks that feature. It comes in at $799.99. Other than the Internet monitoring, the two units appear identical. My system dosen't need internet access or monitoring. | ||||
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| In A Cabinet | ||||
Like most equipment, it can be rack mounted or slid into a cabinet. Below is my equipment cabinet. The PowerPlay 5000 occupies the fourth shelf and the PowerPack 1500 occupies the fifth shelf. If you have a dedicated light-tight room such as mine, you'll always want to control stray light. The status lights on the front display are extremely bright. Not a problem because you can control the brightness. In my case it's not an issue because the front of my cabinet door is made up of black speaker cloth. Little to no light passes through that cloth. I like the cloth because it allows my equipment to have frontal ventilation. |
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| Mighty Bright Lights | ||||
All of my equipment emits various types of colored lights. As you can see from the picture below, the cabinet door barely passes light through the speaker cloth. The botom line is, the light doesn't reach the screen. |
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| IP Address | ||||
I have to say, this is my favorite feature. It's the ability to control and program the Power Center 5000 and the PowerPack 1500 via an IP address. The Power Center 5000 is connected to my router via a network cable. All you have to do is simply type in the IP address and voilà, the control panel interface appears. If you don't know the IP address, not a problem. That address will appear on the front panel of the Power Center 5000. Write it down and save it for future use. The image below is my web browser's URL address bar. I blanked-out the IP address. Once you enter the IP address, you'll see the Control Panel display. |
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| Control Panel - "System Status OFF" (Idle) | ||||
The image below is the home page, a.k.a. the Control Panel. Everything you can do via the network connection, you can also do from the front panel of the unit itself. Then again, why would you bother with the front panel when you have an excellent simple controllable interface through a web browser? The next thing you should see is the home page, a.k.a. the Control Panel. The default page is the System Status. As you can see below, it is a very simple interface. You can name the page. In my case, I called it Theater. Why? Because it's in the theater. It's as simple as that. Along the left you'll see four page options in a blue table. The red bar below the "System Power" means the system is off. The green squares below the "Zone Power" means those outlets are active. The red squares are switched off and can be set on delays. I'll explain later. |
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| Control Panel - "System Status ON" | ||||
| The blue bar below the System Power means the system is on. The green squares below the Zone Power means those outlets are active. The red squares are gone and now active. Mine are set on delays so all of the equipment doesn't activate simoultaniously. You can simply click on any square to turn it (toggle) "On" or "Off". | ||||
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Control Panel - "Configuration" |
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The Configuration page is where you set your "Unit Name". As you can see below, my Unit Name is "Theater". The Unit Lockout is set to Off. It locks and unlocks the front panel. My Display Level is set to Dim. It controls the brightness of the front panel display. By the way, the Dim setting is still very bright. I wish it could dim even more. The image below displays all 10 Zones. Each outlet on the back of the Power Center 5000 corresponds to a zone. Each zone has two electrical plug inputs. Zone 1 is outlet 1. Zone 2 is outlet 2, and so on. Zone Name is the name of the controlled device connected to that zone outlet. I named my Zone 1 "Pre-amp" because my Marantz AV8003 is connected to that zone. Zone 2,Zone 6, Zone 8 and Zone 10 are unoccupied and therefore left at their factory default settings. Delay Mode sets the zone outlet function. There aresix options available in a dropdown box. There's Always On, Switched, Delayed, Programmed, Reboot and Auto-Reboot. The Zones set to Switched will turn simoultaniously on when the AV5000 is turned on and when the AV5000 is turned off Zone1 (Pre-amp), Zone 4 (PlayStation 3), Zone 5 (Blu-ray Player) and Zone 7 (Projector) are set to "Always On" because the connected devices always need power for remote control direct access. They can work independently with my MX3000 remote control. If you look at the first System Status image you'll see the Always On shown as green squares. Turn-On Delay allows you to set the delay in seconds. You don't want all of your equipment power load to turn on at the same time. My amp is on a three second delay and my subwoofer amp is on a six second delay. Turn-Off Delay allows you to set the delay in seconds. UPS Priority Level refers to the optional PowerPack 1500 MKII battery backup. The three options are "None" (no battery backup), "Normal" (some battery backup), "Critical" (full battery backup). Great battery efficiency feature. After you complete your programming, you'll select the bottom left "Save" button. |
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Control Panel - "Infrared Codes" |
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Infrared Codes allows the Power Center 5000 to issue IR commands. I don't use any of those codes. I don't need them. You probably won't either; however, if you want to go the route of the code setup, I created a link to those codes. Here are the codes: 1) PowerPlay Commands HEX Codes in .pdf 2) Pronto Power Play IR Codes in .pdf |
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Control Panel - "Add Infrared Codes" |
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| Control Panel - "Network" | ||||
Enable DHCP uses the settings from your router or switch. The settings automatically populate. The image below has empty settings because I removed them for this web page. You can manually enter the setting if you uncheck the Enable DHCP box. |
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| My room and equipment | ||||
1) Dedicated Room: 10'H x 14'W x 22'D (room is light tight) |
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| Functionality | ||||
*Again, the system is very easy to setup. The setup includes linking the Power Center 5000 to the PowerPack 1500, selecting and connecting your electronics to the appropriate input and setting your programming options for those inputs. If you connect your system to your computer, you can access all of the menus via an IP Address. From there it's dropdown boxes, radio buttons and a little typing to rename inputs. That's it. No engineering degree necessary, |
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| Lightning World | ||||
Southwest Florida's summers are anxiety enducing. We have miserable heat, humidity and thunderstorms. Did I mention huricanes? We have to live with lightning strikes, brown-outs, brief and not so brief power outages and plain old dirty power. Around here, it's just a fact of life. My Power Center 5000 and PowerPack 1500 were intoduced to those facts in June of 2010. As promised by PS Audio, the system delivered. We had some horrible thunderstorms that caused multiple brief power interruptions. My system never waivered. At the time, I was heavily involved in a life threatening situation. I was in Karachi, sort of. I was in the mitts of an online game battle of Call Of Duty 2: Modern Warfare. The components connected to the PowerPack 1500 continued to operate normally. The components not connected (power amps) to the PowerPack 1500 were briefly, and safely, shut down by the Power Center 5000. Within a second or two, the Power Center 5000 reiniciated those same components. Which, by the way, was exactly why I bought the thing. |
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Conclusion |
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I realize this is not an engineer's perspective of the hows and whys of the system. It's not meant to be. It just a real world look by an end-user. You do get what you pay for. My older Panamax system, at best, did an okay job. However, by comparison, we're talking about apples and oranges. The Power Center 5000 in combination with the PowerPack 1500's level of sophistication and simplisity make it a necessary intricate part of a home theater and or home entertainment system. The downside? It's not cheap! Then again, neither is replacing lightning, surge, spiked and brownout damaged equipment. Been there-done that. As for the improved sound quality, there is an improvement. The exact amount of improvement is ambiguious at best. There's no reasonable way to conduct that type A/B test. I look at the PS Audio Power system as an investment. If possible, you may consider spending a little more to protect your various components with a quality product such as the PS Audio Power Center 5000 in combination with the PowerPack 1500. |
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| *Side note: I called the company to ask a question about changing the IP Address via the front panel. I ended up with an automated recording about all sales personnel were busy. It said to leave a message and somebody would get back with me. Well, that didn't happen. Unfortunately, I had to make the IP Address change to my router, and then reboot all of my devices, so the Power Center 5000 could see my network. So much for customer support. | ||||
Here's the link for Power Center 5000 product information page: Here's the link for Power Center 1500 product information page: |
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