The power conditioning and power protection category might not have the wow factor of audio video components or pizzazz of automation programming, but it could be the most mission-critical in a dealer’s portfolio. After all, it’s the components that are protecting – and even improving the performance – all the other equipment in a rack.
Torus Power president Kevin Main talks about his company’s unique power technologies to help integrators amp up their systems, set up a proper power foundation and deliver clean power in this week’s CE Pro Podcast.
The company has a deep background in toroidal power transformers, Main explains, dating back to the mid-1980s when it OEM’d power supplies for high-performance audio companies. He says Torus Power worked with the likes of Krell, Bryston, Pass Labs, Mark Levinson, McIntosh and others “where we kind of cut our teeth” in the audio world.
It also made toroidal transformers for medical equipment manufacturers, and around 2006 Torus Power began delivering clean audio to AV systems in the CEDIA channel, centered on the toroidal isolation transformer.
Lately, the company and its dealers have been busy, Main says. Torus Power continues to focus on its AVR Elite Series, which offers models as part of the company’s Voltage Regulation Series, to assist installers in providing clean power to customers’ systems.
“With the voltage regulation what we do is we’re providing a stable voltage to the equipment even when the input voltage could be fluctuating,” Main explains. “So our products will take voltage between 90 volts and 130 on the incoming side and it will input 120 +/- 4 volts to the equipment. Just making sure the equipment has a good platform for clean power.”
Main discusses some other developments the company continues to work on, such as the Torus Power Connect, which is a cloud-based website for control, configuration, data logging and reporting. It provides installers with a customer dashboard to access each installation, enabling remote access, troubleshooting and control via a browser interface on a smart phone, tablet, or computer.
He adds that Torus Power has also been involved in developing custom transformers that can deliver clean power to projectors in theaters to operate at their peak level, without worry of voltage fluctuation.
Main addresses the power category and how Torus Power differentiates from others. He notes that it’s technically not quite power conditioning, because the technology itself is a bit different in that it is delivering is toroidal isolation.
“So it’s not like a power conditioner, we’re actually isolating the equipment from the voltage that’s coming into that environment and we’re basically providing it with its own power foundation,” he explains.
He says another big differentiator is the scale of Torus Power’s product line. The company’s making a range of products that can be used in anything from a 2-channel audio system that might need 15- or 20-amp transformers all the way to 60- or 100-amp transformers that could be used in a custom home theater, he notes, for instance.
“And even beyond that with some of our larger solutions like our All-in-One panel,” Main adds. That series has an electrical panel built right into the unit so it makes it easy for an electrician to wire up a product and to deliver power to different places within the residence, he says.
“For us it’s really all about the technology and the scale of what we do,” he says.
Main talks about the benefits of Torus Power Connect and its ability to provide insights and proactive troubleshooting for dealers. He also mentions some applications that have grown in the last couple of years during Covid, such as powering home recording studios and spaces.
“Being able to do mixing and mastering in a home environment, that’s become a pretty important category for us over the last couple of years,” Main says. “Musicians, producers and engineers have been forced to work from a home environment and that’s benefited us to help provide for them in that environment.”
Large video walls has also been an exciting customer application segment due to the unique power demands of those systems, Main adds. Hear more from Main on the benefits of clean power to AV systems; spec’ing a system for integrators with Torus’ free design service; figuring out the actual power spec of a full system to optimize performance; how to demo solutions; and more by downloading or watching the podcast above.
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