After I got my McIntosh equipment I decided it was finally time to break down and buy some protection for all of my electronics and I decided to get a Power Conditioner. I ended up buying a Panamax 5100. There are two big players in this field Monster Power and Panamax. I am not a real big fan of Monster Power, I feel they rely more on marketing than they do on engineering. That said their power centers are not bad products but for my money I went with Panamax. One of the important specs to look at when buying one of these units is the joule rating and when it comes to comparing Panamax to Monster Power you pretty much always get a better joule rating for the buck with Panamax.

I am not a huge believer in the claims that these units clean up the power and make you system look and sound better, I was more buying it for the safety aspect of it and piece of mind. Panamax guarantees that if any of your equipment should happen to get damaged they will either repair or replace it. That alone gives me some nice piece of mind. Now I have no idea how many hoops you’d have to jump through to get them to actually do this if something should happen to your equipment but it still gives me a nice sense of security.

The Panamax 5100 is a nice looking unit, it has a nice nice black face plate with a power button, power LED’s to show you which outlets are active, an LED to tell you that the unit is plugged in properly, a button to change the displays brightness (a very nice feature for a dark theater) a voltmeter and a front jack. The front jack isn’t the prettiest thing but it has come in handy many many times in the past. The rear of the unit has 10 additional power jacks, a circuit breaker, coax jacks to clean up your cable and satellite lines, a voltage trigger to turn the unit on when other equipment is powered on and LAN and phone jacks to clean up those signals.

I didn’t really notice any difference in the sound quality or video image after installing the Panamax 5100, we have pretty clean power around here. I bought this unit purely for piece of mind and for ease of plugging things into one central location. For that alone it was worth the price to me. The Panamax 5100 isn’t very expensive, you can pick one up for under $250 and to me it’s worth the price.