In reply to:
So, what your saying is, a power surge protecting UPS would be a great way to go when the demand is high from an amp or receiver??
Can you explain further? Sounds like you're worried about the current draw from your amp being too much for the house AC... if that's true, it's an engineering problem with either the amp or house wiring.
I was assuming the discussion was on power conditioning and brownout/spike protection.
A line conditioner is a pretty broad term. A true line conditioner smoothes out small fluctuations in the AC line, usually through an electromagnetic coil (technical term is a toroidal something or other). There's no regulation on the term so it can mean pretty much whatever the marketing department wants.
A power conditioner strips out the AC sine wave and recreates it at a clean 60Hz. These are really expensive and do a good job of extending the life of transformers in electrical equipment (especially computer power supplies, which are notoriously inexpensively made). Again, most line conditioners call themselves power conditioners incorrectly.
As for voltage boost/buck:
Bucking high voltage involves having some metal oxide varistors (MOVs) connected between the hot and ground lines. The resistance of these MOVs is near infinite at 120v (keeping hot and ground separate) but with increased voltage, the resistance drops and power is allowed to shunt from the hot wire to ground causing a drop in voltage on the hot wire down to ~120v - the excess voltage is carried away on the ground wire. I believe some systems also use some kind of sacrificial material (besides the damage that spikes cause the MOVs) to take up the extra voltage.
Boosting low voltage is easiest with a battery system - when voltage drops below a prescribed amount, a power inverter kicks in to supply AC voltage from a DC battery.
Bren R.
