Some weeks ago, I received a phone call early in the day. What I heard was a tale of the previous night. There had been a violent storm, a warning of an impending tornado, large hail plummeting from the sky! That night’s terror soon came to a shocking conclusion . . .
A week previously, I’d met a delightful lady who had called me for a new TV. I don’t think her current TV was even 30 inches diagonal. It was an early flatscreen with unremarkable specs, but it had served her purpose for years. After doing some redecorating, she found that her old TV was no longer enough. She was sitting too far from it to see the small screen properly. This time, she wanted something special. The available wall space limited its size to 42 inches diagonal, but this was a huge improvement over her previous TV.
She also included a challenge. She wanted great sound without hooking the TV to a stereo system.
There was only one right answer: Sony’s 42-inch OLED (which stands for organic light-emitting diode). It was just the right size, with the most accurate picture and the technology to create deep blacks and vivid colors in 4K resolution. It actually uses the whole TV screen to vibrate as its speaker system.
As long as one doesn’t listen too loudly or want surround sound, this TV sounds far better than most flat TVs with their tiny speakers. It also contains a server for playing apps for an unending supply of audio and video content. She happily treated herself to this wonderful set.
I ordered it, delivered it, and set it up, and it was gorgeous from the start. The sound and picture were great. She still had to get internet service installed for the channels she wanted, so I left happy, knowing I had one more visit to make in a few days to wrap up the installation.
Now back to the shocking conclusion. Only days after the install, she called to say that her home had taken a direct hit from a powerful lightning bolt! She now had five holes in her roof from the strike, and it left her house and its appliances smoldering. The fire department had to be called! She’s currently out of the house until the roof and the smoke damage can be repaired.
Unfortunately, her brand new TV also died an early death.
This is the Midwest, and we have lots of thunderstorms. At every store where I worked over the years, from Champaign, Illinois, to the Chicago suburbs to here in Iowa, every thunderstorm would bring in a handful of clients who needed repairs to equipment damaged by nearby strikes. But this recent incident was the first direct lightning hit in my 50 years in the AV business.
The only proper planning for a direct hit is to have insurance to cover your AV system. Lightning delivers 5 billion joules of energy, so nothing can protect you from that. However, most lightning damage can be prevented, because a nearby lightning strike radiates only a small percentage of that power. So a good power conditioner built to protect your electronics can save you from a costly repair. The best ones are also power strips and often have hookups for you to protect your cable and ethernet from lightning surges as well.
Investing in a power conditioner is a smart idea. One that blocks 2,000 to 3,000 joules should effectively protect your electronics. The good news is that a well-designed power conditioner can also give you big gains in your system’s performance. It can clean the noise and harmonics out of your home’s electricity, which greatly increases your TV’s sound and picture quality.
There are many power strip companies, but few do enough to protect your equipment from bad AC or voltage spikes. Most do nothing to remove the noise from your home’s electricity. I suggest that you take full advantage of a well-built power conditioner with the ability to both protect your system and clean up your home’s power. Good equipment lasts far longer when it has clean power. And these days, it costs far less to do this than ever before.
Here’s one more story about lightning. A friend of mine just told me about an experience he’d had as a small child. He and his young brother were sitting on the living room floor in front of their TV, watching cartoons. He remembers suddenly having a strong feeling that he should move to the couch, some feet further from the TV. About a minute after he did, lightning blew a hole in the wall behind the TV so big that a man could walk through it!
His brother miraculously suffered only some cuts, but the TV died. The moral: Invest in a real power conditioner, but don’t ignore the insurance.