The world of AC power products for home theater and audiophile equipment can be a mysterious one, with product offerings ranging from glorified "bus strips" to component-sized "surge protectors" to more complex, amplifier-like power regenerators. PurePower™'s 1050 is a high-end power regeneration device that takes the AC power you get right from the wall and regenerates the signal, so that your home theater and audiophile electronics run completely isolated from the maladies of the outside world. Here in California, we suffer from frequent and nasty brownouts where the power voltage dips to dangerously low levels for home theater equipment, as little has been done to upgrade the power grid in the past 40 years in a state that represents the world's fifth-largest economy. I have seen with my own eyes a $30,000 AV preamp go up in a cloud of dielectric smoke when it couldn't recover from a power issue in my rack during an early-morning California brownout. The PurePower™ 1050 eliminates this issue and solves many more electrical issues. It is priced at $2,495.

At the risk of sounding like an electrical engineer in this explanation, the way the PurePower™ 1050 works is it takes the incoming AC signal from the wall and converts is to DC. It then converts it again to a pure 60 Hz - 120 volt AC signal. This is exactly the bench standard that your power-thirsty amps and sensitive audiophile products are hungering for and will perform best receiving. The idea of power surges, sags (like the aforementioned brownouts), dips and other noisy maladies are virtually eliminated. It is important to note that PurePower™ isn't the only power regeneration product in the home theater market. PS Audio made the category famous in the late 1990s. However, PurePower™ today offers much a more efficient AC regeneration component. Historically, the design of products like the PS Audio devices wasted a lot of their power recreating a clean signal, so you couldn't really plug any meaningful power amplifier into their physically huge power regeneration devices without them shutting down within minutes of playing loud passages. Reportedly, PS Audio's newer units are much better. PurePower™'s units are reportedly 92 percent efficient, so the idea of running a full home theater system from one unit is reasonable, even if you have a pair of Mark Levinson 400-watt mono-block amps, as I do. The reported 1050 watts feeds them all pure power.

Another key feature of the PurePower™ 1050 is its battery backup. When doing demonstrations on the road with the reps, it's not uncommon to see someone yank the power cord out of the wall mid-movie, but the entire system keeps on rocking - assuming it's all plugged into a PurePower™ 1050. Try that with a high-performance DLP projector and expect the bulb life expectancy to take a nose dive, assuming the projector doesn't overheat and fail right on the spot, even when it is off. Installers love the Pure Power, because during a thunderstorm, a system that loses power has upwards of 30 minutes of grace period to be able to be softly shut down. The PurePower™ will warn when it is about to run out of battery power. The unit also realistically extends the life of AV components by feeding them truly clean power, protecting them from surges, as well as keeping them from suffering damage from abrupt power loss to a high-performance home theater system.

Performance improvements in your system are beyond the nuts-and-bolts mathematical factors described above. With the PurePower™ 1050 in the system, even the non-audiophile can hear a noticeable drop in the noise floor in an audiophile or home theater system. Gone is a lot (if not all) of that background static, white noise and other audio yuckiness. All you hear is quiet, which is the way it is at the labs where they engineer your equipment and the studios where they master the movies and music you enjoy. On a more subtle level, the performance of your components improves. It's not to say they don't work when they get 112 volts of power, because they do. What I am suggesting is that they work ever so slightly better on pure power and, when you combine the effect of that with your entire system, there is a definite improvement.

High Points
• Your ability to get more life and more performance from your system improves when you have it plugged into a PurePower™ 1050 AC regeneration device.
• If you can get your front projector plugged into a PurePower™, you will avoid the possibility that your system could lose power and cause significant damage to your bulb or the actual projector.
• Battery backup allows your system to have a chance to be shut down softly, without the jolt of losing power or struggling through a brownout.
• The incremental improvement, with each component getting clean, accurate power, isn't inconsequential when you add up the effect across your entire system.
• No component benefits more than your amplifier from the PurePower™, as it needs the most power in your rack by a large margin. Tubes shine more and solid state amps sound more dynamic and quick. Don't believe your ears? Plug the amps back into the wall and do an A-B test to hear the difference. It's not subtle.

Low Points
• The PurePower™ 1050 is very heavy and needs consideration for that weight in an installed rack, much like all AC power products do.
• 1050 watts of power isn't enough for all systems. If you have seven channels or more of audiophile, big-boy power, one PurePower™ 1050 might not be enough for your entire system. You might need two or even three.

Conclusion
The PurePower™ 1050 is one of the most innovative and important components in the home theater business in recent memory. If you are an enthusiast looking to find the audiophile Holy Grail, don't let AC power be a limiting factor to your quest. If you are a custom installer or AV integrator and you are trying to improve your profitability by reducing service calls to your clients' projects, start installing the Pure Power 1050 into every job. The idea of getting absolutely pure, off-the-grid power with full 30-minute battery backup is just too important to overlook.