Preventing Equipment Break Down

We were playing a gig at a club in Cook City, Montana. Cook City is a wonderful little town just outside the north east entrance to Yellowstone Park. Tourists visiting the park stay there at night and go into the park during the day. It’s a great place to play music. Your rooms are free and during the day, for a small fee, you can go into the park.

Things were going well, we had a good crowd and the acoustic were as close to perfect as they could be. Then the sun went down and they turned on the big florescent light in the front of the club. The PA went crazy, the guitar player’s amps started making strange noises and their sound quality went straight down hill sometimes to the point where the amps were cutting in and out. It seems that, like most of the clubs we play, there was not a sufficient amount of voltage being delivered to the building to provide the amount of electricity needed to handle the entire load being put on the system. This was an extreme case. This can cause electronic equipment (amplifiers, preamps, bass guitars, just about anything you are using that operates on electricity) to malfunction or sustain damage.

My bass guitar rig, however, sounded as good as ever. This is because I use and have used for a number of years a Furman AR-15 II Voltage Regulator Power Conditioner. It is in my rack before my preamp, power amp and my wireless system (Shortly there after everyone had one, and we all chipped in for one for the PA).

I am not trying to sell (well maybe) you a Voltage Regulator Power Conditioner, but I highly recommend you have one in your rack. You can get the newer version of the AR-15 from BassPlayerGear.com.

Furman P-1800 AR Voltage Regulator / Power Conditioner

Provides a stable flow of 120V of AC power and reduces line noise for uninterrupted service.

The 15 Amp P-1800 AR delivers a stable 120 volts of AC power to protect equipment from problems caused by AC line voltage irregularities such as sags, brownouts, or overvoltages—all of which can cause sensitive electronic equipment to malfunction or sustain damage. The P-1800 AR accepts input voltages over a wide AC voltage range and transforms it to a constant output of 120V, ±5V. Voltages beyond that range may also be converted to usable levels, depending on the range variance.

Additionally, the P-1800 AR is a full-featured power conditioner that filters and purifies AC power, reducing line noise and ensuring optimum performance. Not only will your equipment perform better with Furman's Linear Filtering Technology (LiFT), but it will also be fully protected by their exclusive Series Multi-Stage Protection (SMP) and Extreme Voltage Shutdown (EVS) technologies. This circuitry provides an extremely high level of power protection.