Conditioner vs. Surge protector

Please take a look at this App. Note on MOV surge protectors:   www.onfilter.com/protection-from-transients   
In short, MOVs do pretty well once their breakdown limit is reached (~400V and up for 120VAC systems, ~600...900V for 250VAC); they don't do much at all when the surge peaks are under that voltage.  A spike of 300V can get through to your equipment unimpeded if all you rely is MOVs  Also, watch for MOV's "expiration date" of a sorts - with every absorbed spike they wear out a bit until becoming essentially non-functional.

Years ago I found that the varistors commonly used in surge protectors tend to squash system dynamics. and do not allow them any where near my rig. YMMV.

@pesky_wabbit  Amp or all equipment?  I totally agree on amps.  Other equipment, I'm ok with a good protector.

My Naim CD player definitely didn’t like them. I can‘t really be more specific as I then removed them from the equation and stopped doing any more low power consumption A-B testing. Definitely worth you pursuing though.

I run a Furman elite 15 for my 2 channel and a Panamax 5400 for my home theater and a Panamax 4000 for my office.  There's pros and cons to all of it.  If you have a noisy line, they will pull out the noise.  The 5400 and Furman elite pull out almost all the noise from the line, the 4000 has about a 90% reduction.  The cons to this is reduced dynamics.  The Panamax units have a tendency to compress sound under heavy load.  Not really that big of a deal in a home theater w/ efficient speakers as I'm not going for extreme detail.  The Furman does a much better job at resisting compression, but it still does when you push it hard.  Thankfully I'm just running a pair of MC275s in mono and it doesn't draw too much power, though it's very noticeable when running a larger 450w stereo amp.  More expensive unites come with much larger capacitators so they can handle those dynamics, but you're looking at 3-4x the cost of the Elite 15.