>>I wonder how the Brick Wall reacts to sharp spikes with all of that circuitry?
I think the idea is that the big inductor (LC circuit, really) slows down the voltage rise so that the active circuitry has time to kick in. It's interesting reading, really -- they describe it more as a noise filter which dynamically adjusts the cutoff frequency by hooking in additional capacitors when it detects a fast voltage rise. The interesting graph was :
The upper trace is the normal frequency response of the input LC circuit... you can see it is already 20 dB down at 30 KHz, so it is definitely going to round off the rise time on a sharp-edged impulse.
I don't remember off the top of my head how quickly a typical SCR can fire, but certainly the story seems credible.
