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In the Forum: Audio Discussions
In the Thread: It’s mad, mad, mad... electricity.

Post Subject: No comparisonPosted by manisandher on: 9/19/2012

manisandher wrote:
I'm happy to compare the new PP+3000 to my old PP2000 and share my findings.

So, the PP+3000 arrived... and went pretty much straight back.

As soon as I switched the battery pack on, it started hissing and emitting a God-awful smell. I packed everything up and had it collected the next day. The retailer (Audio Emotion in the UK) told me that the battery pack had suffered a massive trauma during transit - something like a spike going into its underside. I didn't notice anything untoward - although to be fair, I didn't purposefully look at underside of the shipping box or battery supply.

There was one thing that I did do before I packed everything away though. I tried switching the head unit on without the battery pack connected to it. And it worked! Everything displayed correctly, telling me that the battery pack was 'N.C.' Two things that I can report without the battery pack connected:

1) The by-pass switch did not work. Maybe the battery pack is required, although I can't for the life of me understand why this would be the case.

2) I didn't really like the sound. It was weighty and full-bodied, but the delicacy and sparkle that I've become accustomed to with the PP2000 was gone. I would totally accept that actually it might be the PP2000 that's 'at fault' here - injecting some noise or whatever into the regenerated AC -but whatever the PP2000 is doing, it seems to do wonders for the sound. Also, there's obviously the strong possibility that the PP+3000 needs the battery pack to perform optimally. But the fact that it 'works' without one, and really was regenerating the AC (I had 245V going in and 230V coming out) was really confusing for me. I mean, does that battery actually do anything under normal operation? Or does it just kick in when the mains AC drops too low? If it's just the latter, I'd much rather have a battery-less regenerator - it'd be much, much lighter and should be a damn sight less expensive (especially taking shipping costs into account).

Audio Emotion were happy to send me a replacement PP+3000. But based on my initial experience, I declined and asked for a refund. I may well order the PP+3000 again in the future, but won't do this until others in the field have reported their own findings. Apparently, Audio Emotion have shipped >20 other PP+ units with no reported issues whatsoever.

With this post, I may well ruffle the feathers of Audio Emotion and/or PurePower, but quite frankly I'm not casting any judgement on them, just stating my experience.

Mani.

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