APC AV H15 1.5kVA H Type Power Conditioner Review

APC AV H15: Introduction and First Impressions

"Pursuing the truth in audio and video" has often translated into "pointing out the snake oil that permeates our field." Of course cables have long been a culprit but also on our short list is power conditioning. I can't tell you how many of these products we've come across that were practically empty boxes with reinforced sidewalls for added heft. We've found some that have actually created accentuated spikes rather than suppress them. Snake oil doesn't even begin to describe it. And the price tags that are associated with such products would turn your stomach. At least it did me. But that doesn't stop other home theater publications from gushing over them.

APC has long been associated with UPS and power solutions that are probably used by your school, business, and plenty of governmental entities. Well respected doesn't begin to describe them. I often wonder how a company like APC decides to get in to the home theater market. Now, I can't honestly say that I know how this all went down but this is what I envision…

Fade up on the office of a powerful corporate executive bent over his desk looking over blueprints and contracts. The glass on the door reads "Chief Research Officer APC".

Enter flustered employee, bursting through the door. He's forgotten to knock but doesn't seem to remember that in his excitement. The CRO looks up, annoyed at first but he holds his tongue as he sees the expression on the employee's face. The employee holds a magazine open and slams it down on the CRO's desk.

Employee: You've GOT to see this…

CRO: What's the meaning of…

His voice trails off as he looks down at the open magazine. The employee has placed it upside down but it is clear that it is a photograph of the internals of some sort of AV equipment. The CRO's eyes squint in concentration as he slowly turns the magazine and begins to decipher the device laid bare.

CRO: What's this supposed to be?

Employee: They call it a power conditioner!

The CRO's eyebrows arch violently. Surprise is evident on his face.

CRO: But that'll never work!

Employee: I know but look at what they are charging for it!

He points to a 4 figure price tag.

CRO: That's outrageous!

Soon after it was decided that APC should provide a product that not only performed the advertised function but didn't rake the consumer over the coals for doing so.

First Impressions and Build Quality

My little fiction aside, APC has really put together a nice piece of equipment in the H15. The H15 is a stand alone unit that provides surge protection, isolated noise filtering, and voltage regulation. Do you need this? I can't say. But you most certainly need the surge protection. Isolated noise filtering might be needed if your neighbor uses power tools or if your wife likes to blow-dry her hair during the climatic scenes of Lord of the Rings. Voltage regulation would be considered necessary if you live in an area near a high current draw (like a hospital) which might lower or raise your voltage unexpectedly or if your home theater shares a circuit with your AC. My only caveat here is for those of you with projectors (anything with a bulb). Ensuring a stable voltage source will increase your bulb life significantly. Depending on the cost of your replacement bulbs, this could amount to a serious cost savings.

The H15 is built like a rectangular, silver tank. At over 16 pounds, it certainly feels like a hefty piece of electronics equipment. The front of the unit has a small two-line LCD display, three buttons, and a number of lights. The central button is an On/Off button (they recommend On at all times). Once the H15 is integrated into your system, I can see no reason why you'd want to turn it off. The left button is for accessing the Setup menus and the right button is a Select button for use when choosing the different settings.

There are a number of lights on the front panel which indicate the state of the unit. Working from the bottom left and going clockwise we have:

• Overload Status Indicator - Will light up (red) if you've plugged too much stuff into the H15. Unplug stuff until the light goes away.

• Wiring OK Status Indicator - If it is blue, your house is wired properly. If it is not lit then either there is a missing ground, overloaded neutral or reversed polarity. Call an electrician.

• Line OK Status Indicator - If it is blue, you're OK. If it is not lit the input voltage is too low (or high) and the unit will go into boost or trim mode to compensate. You may hear a clicking sound.

• Filtering Status Indicator - When blue, EMI/RFI noise reduction circuit is active.

• Line Boost Status Indicator - When lit (orange) the H15 is boosting the voltage.

• Switched On Status Indicator - All outlets (except those with a programmed delay) are receiving power.

• Delayed On Status Indicator - All delayed outlets are receiving power.

• Line Trim Status Indicator - When lit (orange) the H15 is trimming the voltage.

Taking a look at the back of the unit, we see the 12 outlets which are all labeled in some way (all the labels on the back of the unit are suggestions only - your DVD player won't blow up if you plug it in to the CD outlet). Under the Digital Filter label, there are 6 outlets labeled CD, DVD, DVR, CATV/SAT, Monitor, Aux. The Video Filter has TV and VCR, Analog has Tuner/Aux and Preamp/RCVR, and Delayed has Subwoofer and Amplifier. The strike against these outlets is that the outlets are a little too close for your larger wall warts. There is a single in and two outs for CATV/ Modem RF cable and one in and one out for a SAT/Antenna RF. If you have a telephone line that you'd like protected there is a single in and two outs. There is a removable power cord along with a manual circuit breaker button (in case of a major surge) and DC trigger in and out ports. Lastly, there is a System Ground Terminal for you to tie all your grounding wires to eliminate ground loops and their accompanied hum.

From an aesthetic standpoint, the H15 just can't be beat. The review unit is silver but there is a black version as well. Personally, I prefer the silver. Cracking open the case we see a large isolation transformer separated from the analog input filters, high quality MOV’s for surge suppression, and heavy gauge wiring to ensure maximum power delivery. This is no empty box! There is no doubt that this design utilizes some high quality parts and sturdy construction all backed by UL Certification which is a rarity in the business of home theater power conditioners. UL Certification is something that one should be very concerned about when looking into surge protection and power conditioning. Why? Well, I can't say that non-UL certified products are necessarily unsafe, but I can say that UL certified products ARE safe. If you want to take your chances with non-UL certified products, have at it. It's your equipment to fry.

APC AV H15: Menus, Use, and Conclusion

If you hit the Select button on the front of the H15, it will cycle between four different displays. The Power display shows you how much power your equipment is drawing and what percentage that is of the total power available. The Vout/Iout screen will let you know the voltage and amps going out to your equipment. The Vin/Freq screen tells you the incoming voltage and frequency. Lastly, the Serial Number and Firmware Version Display is pretty self-explanatory.

By far my favorite display was Power. I had my display, receiver, and SMS-1 plugged into the H15. With everything on and at a normal listening volume (able to carry on a conversation at the same time) the power draw was about 20% (of the 1440 voltage-amps (VA) available). Being a bit of a sadist, I decided to see just how much power I could pull with the Denon AVR-2307CI using the DVD-A of Porcupine Tree: Deadwing. Deadwing is a multichannel music disc with tons of information. I felt that I could be sure that I was taxing my receiver (and the APC) as much as possible. Jacking the volume up to +6.5 (which is LOUD), I found I tended to pull around 50% (or about 750VA) with spikes up to about 65%. What does this mean? At pretty much max volume I had plenty of headroom for just about every non-amp component in my home (which is a lot). It also makes you realize how little continuous power you draw. It's all in dynamics which the APC display is too slow to track. Plus, it was fun to try and overload the H15.

There are a few menus on the H15 that are accessed by hitting the Setup button. Once you get to the menu you want, you must hit the Select button until you get to the correct setting. Each menu has a number of options so I'll run through them individually:

Dimmer: There are a total of eight options (Off, Dim3, Dim2, Dim1, Normal, Bright1, Bright2, Bright3) with Dim3 being the lowest (other than 'Off' of course) and Bright3 the brightest. You're going to want to adjust this based on your love of pretty blue lights and the placement in your room. In my room I preferred the lowest setting which gave me just enough light to see the indicator lights but not so much that the display was distracting me.

AVR Range: There are only three setting here - Wide, Normal and Narrow. Narrow regulates to 120 volts plus/minus 5% (or 102-132 Volts). Normal is 120 +/- 10% (97-139 Volts) and Wide is 120 +/- 15% (92-145 Volts). We suggest you start with Narrow. If you find that the H15 is running into boost/trim issues too often, bump it up. I had mine set to Narrow and almost never had it adjust.

Delay Time: Here you can select the delay time for the two delayed outlets. You have the option of 0-12 seconds in 1 second intervals

Beeper: Turn the beeper on and off. The beeper only sounds when you are controlling the unit so this isn't much of an issue.

Language: If you don't speak/read English (so I'm guessing this review isn't helping you much) you can choose French or Spanish.

Set-Up & General Use

You almost don't need the manual or anything else to setup this unit. Plug everything into the appropriate outlets, plug the unit into the wall, and turn it on. That's pretty much it. During my evaluation period, I almost never heard a sound out of the thing. Once I dimmed the front display I pretty much forgot it was there. It looked pretty, it did its job, and it didn't bug me.

That's not to say that it was a glorified surge protector. It was far more than that. I was surprised to note how often I'd see the Line Boost light lit. Occasionally on power up and would hear it click indicating that there was a dip in the available power as all those components were powering on but that would subside after a moment or two. The Line Boost however was indicative of a systemic (albeit minor) problem with my power. It didn't so much as hiccup at this issue but it was nice to know that it was doing something.

What I found particularly reassuring was that the APC AV H15 was designed to inform me of any wiring problems in the house. As most of us haven't built our houses from the ground up, there is always this nagging doubt that there might be a problem somewhere - not any more. Add to that the fact that the H15 is UL approved and will perform well above the stated specs gives me piece of mind that my gear will be safe even in the worst of Florida's weather (save floods of course).

The only issue I had with the H15 was its interaction with a subwoofer. Some amps are designed such that they will fool the H15 into thinking that it is in a low voltage situation. The H15 will naturally boost the voltage to accommodate. This can blow the fuses on the sub amps which have very tight operational tolerances (provided they have them). I had this happen twice before I discerned it was the H15/sub interaction. From the standpoint of blame - it's hard to find a culprit. The amp is doing what it is supposed to be doing and the H15 is doing its job. My suggestion is to connect the H15 to a subwoofer with caution. Under normal circumstances this shouldn’t be an issue, but if you find a similar experience when you plug your subwoofer into this unit, disconnect it and plug it into a standard surge protector (APC makes plenty of these as well).  I would like to note that I had a number of receivers plugged into the H15 without a problem so my issue may be isolated specifically to the subwoofer I was using in this review.

Note from APC
The problem Tom experienced is probably the sub-woofer drawing a large in-rush of current, causing the line to sag.  Some types of AV equipment (Class-A amplifiers, sub-woofers, etc.) have extremely large capacitor banks.  If the voltage increases suddenly on these capacitors (when the H15 makes a correction) they demand a large current pulse. Poorly designed equipment has a current limiter that acts only when the equipment is first turned on, or not at all.  This is likely the case for this sub-woofer (which is why they designed it with replaceable fuses - any dramatic voltage change after initial turn-on will likely damage the fuse).

Viewing/Listening Evaluation

I'd love to wax poetic about how much cleaner the sound was or how better realized the picture was on my display but I just can't. Not that you won't notice a difference. Depending on the state of your power in your home, you very well may. But for someone like me with very few power issues, the H15 mostly provided top of the line protection and regulation along with the piece of mind that can't be beat at this price point.

Conclusion

The APC AV H15 performs its every job superbly - of that there is no doubt. I can find no real flaw that I can attribute to it. Depending on your need, the H15 may be a purchase of necessity or just the cherry on the top of your dream system. Personally, the H15 embodies the perfect marriage of form and function. It looks as good as it performs. If you really want to make sure that your system is fully protected or if you have power issues, take a close look at the H15. It's hard to give a value rating to such a product. Should I compare it to surge protectors that cost much less but don't give you the conditioning or feedback that the H15 does? Should I compare it to the high dollar esoteric conditioners that may or may not be of any help in your system? Either way, the performance of the H15 can't be beat... maybe matched but not beat. By that measure, this product is a great value as those that might match it cost vastly more and, in my experience, are inferior on other metrics.

APC AV H15 Power Conditioner

$449.99

APC
132 Fairgrounds Road
W. Kingston , RI 02892
877-272-2722

www.apcav.com

About APC-MGE
In February 2007, APC and MGE UPS Systems combined to form a $3 billion (€2.4 billion) Critical Power & Cooling Services business unit of Schneider Electric. Together, APC and MGE offer the industry’s most comprehensive product and solution range for critical IT and process applications in industrial, enterprise, small and medium business and home environments. APC and MGE solutions include uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), precision cooling units, racks, and design and management software, including APC's InfraStruXure® architecture the industry’s most comprehensive integrated power, cooling, and management solution. Backed by the industry’s broadest service organization and an industry leading R&D investment, the combined company’s 12,000 employees help customers confront today’s unprecedented power, cooling and management challenges. Schneider Electric, with 112,000 employees and operations in 190 countries, had 2006 annual sales of $18 billion (€13.7 billion). For more information on APC and MGE, please visit www.apc-mge.com. All trademarks are the property of their owners.

The Score Card

The scoring below is based on each piece of equipment doing the duty it is designed for. The numbers are weighed heavily with respect to the individual cost of each unit, thus giving a rating roughly equal to:

Performance × Price Factor/Value = Rating

Audioholics.com note: The ratings indicated below are based on subjective listening and objective testing of the product in question. The rating scale is based on performance/value ratio. If you notice better performing products in future reviews that have lower numbers in certain areas, be aware that the value factor is most likely the culprit. Other Audioholics reviewers may rate products solely based on performance, and each reviewer has his/her own system for ratings.

Audioholics Rating Scale

• — Excellent
• — Very Good
• — Good
• — Fair
• — Poor

Metric	Rating
Ease of Setup
Build Quality
Ergonomics & Usability
Features
Fit and Finish
Performance
Value