Surge protector

The best remedy is NOT to listen to direct to wall purists and audio enthusiasts often contributing to discussions here. They are extremely delusional. There are may be X many reasons vs. just ONE safety you can't jeopardize. I have surges nearly daily and my relatively vintage Panamax is a REAL DOG when it comes to protection and voltage stabilization!

The discussion on this got me to dragging my feet.  I did go to Furman's site and I do see that Sweet Water is an authorized dealer, so I think I am going to call them and order a PST-8 from them, and it will be better protection than what I have now, which is no surge protection.

I will say that so far in my life I have NEVER experienced any type of surge activity that damaged any of my components, and once upon a time I never even used to unplug my gear during thunderstorm activity--I was happily oblivious. 

But there is a first time for everything.  I used to eat six raw eggs a day, and when someone told me about raw egg salmonella  I scoffed at that person.  I told him that I must have ate ten thousand raw eggs and never suffered so much as an upset stomach.  But then I thought about it soime more, and I decided that as many raw eggs as I had consumed in my life, I was probably due to get a bad one.  So I don't do that anymore.  As far as my system goes, for the immediate time being it is physically unplugged from the wall when not being used.

I will say that so far in my life I have NEVER experienced any type of surge activity that damaged any of my components, and once upon a time I never even used to unplug my gear during thunderstorm activity--I was happily oblivious.

@jea48

I think this may very well be location dependent. Living in SC, I randomly asked a few people who are NOT techno or audiophiles if they’ve lost equipment to power surges and everyone I asked had. One both in the Berkshires and in South Carolina.

I’ve lost gear or been present when gear went bad half a dozen times in my life. In the last 3 years alone I’ve lost a laptop (plugged in directly) and a cable modem to surges. When I moved in there was in fact a burnt out surge protector still screwed into an outlet, presumably where a TV had been. I lose power about 4x a year due to storms, plus we have about 3 power incidents per year not related to storms when the power goes out or my UPS on my computer has to intervene or my Furman shuts the power off to the stereo or both.

The differences in experience based on geographic location certainly justifies why readers may or may not wish to spend the money for the extra protection. I 100% understand that. What I don’t understand are those who only focus on direct strikes, cause that’s rarely been how I lost gear.