Insurance

If you're unable to take care of your system's power through a Power Plant AC regenerator, then plugging straight into the wall often sounds best.

Then a thunderstorm rolls through and you remember why insurance exists.

A great compromise is a decent surge protector as these devices are not in series (increasing the AC impedance) but rather, they are in parallel and don't impact sound quality at all.

If you can manage it, a whole-house surge protector installed by an electrician at the breaker panel handles the catastrophic events that arrive through the service entrance. That protection is essentially free in audio terms because it sits well upstream of any audio circuit. From there, your gear can plug into a clean source — a power regenerator like our Power Plants or straight into the wall socket without fear of those summer storm disasters.

Protection and purity aren't a trade we have to accept. They're a problem we just have to solve at the right layer of the system.