I do want to be careful not to take the above analogy to hybrid cars too far. With hybrid cars, battery power is used every
few minutes or seconds to deal with the changing demands of the road or traffic. The APC S Type Power Conditioners
however are designed for battery power to be used only in extraordinary circumstances, e.g. where the AC input from the
utility is failing or there is an unusually high current demand such as needed to start a device, rather than in response to
the power needs of a loud passage in a movie or music. I have used hearing protectors and played my system very loud
with everything going through the APC and I was only using about half the available power from the APC. The S20 was
fine, my amplifiers and speakers were doing fine – my ears were the limiting factor. While I can conceive of the S20
going into battery mode during a loud passage in perhaps a much larger venue or with much less efficient speakers, I am
not sure I would want to be in the room at the time!
There was one system integration issue I was not expecting which at first limited my use of the system. When I was
discussing the review system with APC, I was given a choice of an S15 or an S20. The S20 differs from the S15 in two
ways, first the S20 has a somewhat higher rated power capability, 1250 watts vs. 1000 watts for the S15, and second, it
is network enabled allowing control and status monitoring via either RS-232 and/or a network management card to
connect to any Ethernet network.
I chose the S20 for it higher power rating, but what I didn’t realize was that unlike the S15, with the S20 there was no
control of the output banks via 12V DC triggers. All the banks do turn on and off in the proper sequence in response to
the front panel on/off button, but there was no way I found to turn on and off the individual banks without the use of
RS-232 control.
As mentioned earlier, I especially wanted to be able to disable power to the Theta amplifier to not only save power, but
also to reduce the heat load on the room during hot summer days. You can definitely feel the heat from this amplifier even
when it is in the “standby” mode!
For a number of months I operated the AV system with everything except my DISH ViP622 DVR plugged into the S20,
and plugged the DISH DVR directly into the wall so that it could record programs while the S20 and the rest of the
system was turned off. Most “TV” we watch is recorded on the DISH DVR, and unfortunately many of the programs we
recorded during this time had dropouts where the program material was simply missing. This didn’t happen every
program, but often enough to be distressing, and in several cases, was so bad that we simply had to give up on the
program.
Obviously in order to be able to plug the DVR into the S20 while disabling power to the Theta when the system was off,
I needed to get control of the individual outlet banks, and that meant RS-232 control. (It should be noted that if I had
chosen a S15, this control issue would not have been a problem as I could have use a 12V trigger from my preamp to
control the output banks. Make you choice of units accordingly.)
The remote controls I am currently using, a Logitech 890 is IR/RF based and does not directly support RS-232. When I
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