DR_JB,

I read through the thread and a couple of things pop out:

You definitely need to determine if you have an adequate ground.

Also, the benefits of the UPS have not been clearly articulated. The PRIMARY reason to have a UPS on your audio/video system is to take whatever voltage that comes in and output it as a pure 120VAC sine wave. This gives your more available voltage because 120v it the RMS (essentially average) voltage. The actual peak to peak voltage is quite a bit higher. It can take in voltages as low as 86 volts and as high as 137 or so volts, again, outputting it as 120VAC. It also cleans out all line noise and spikes. It has really nothing to do with the issue of when the power goes out other than it protects your gear from the on/off/on/off etc as the power company tries to stablize power in an outage situation.

I have to tell you, I have 2 UPS' in my system. A 1500VA (900 watts) and a 3000VA (2200 watts). The big boy feeds my Outlaw 7125 and my Carver M1.0T. The other one feeds my Adcom GFA555 and the rest of the gear.

I have seen many benefits to having the UPS' in my rack. The first and foremost is it has added unbelievable punch to the low end in my system. My Adcom is in bridged mode (600watts) and drives two 12" subs. So I already had tremendous furniture vibrating low end. But when I hooked the amp up to the UPS, now I can feel the impact in my chest even at lower levels. The reason for this is again, more volts available to the amp because of the pure sine wave. Also, it tends to give you more available reserve for the amp to pull power from. Awesome power. The next benefit was a dramatic increase in imaging. For my mains I have the Martin Logan Aeon electrostactics that already have incredible imaging. But when I hooked the Carver amp and the rest of the gear up to the UPS, HOLY COW! The imaging was rock solid. Better depth. Better width. Increased resolution of the sonic field. WOW. The last benefit I noticed was on my Hitachi rear screen HDTV. The picture has less noise, deeper blacks. I was actually suprised to see the difference.

Everyone who spends the kind of money we do on gear should have one or more of these in their racks. Let me tell you this. Do NOT spend $2K on the high end Monster or similar units. Buy a reconditioned APC or similar rack mount unit that they sell for computer server rooms. You can get them in 120V or 208/240V units that will more than feed everything you need. The 1500VA unit is actually a CyberPower that I paid $200 for. The 3000VA is an APC that I paid $440.

Next to speakers, I would have to say that this is one of the best improvements I have heard in my system. I have tried high end speaker wire and interconnects which helped, but not as much as the UPS.

Good Luck.