ADJ PC-4 Power Center

First look & Tear Down

The ADJ PC-4 is a light duty power switching center that costs less than an extension cord. The online reviews are a mixed bag, with some worrying outliers. But they’ve been on sale forever & some of the negative stories just don’t add up. So, what’s the deal? Are the folks writing bad reviews at fault? Does UL listing really matter for gear like this? We’ll take it apart and talk through what we find together in this episode. But who’s buying these?

At some point in everyone’s gear owning life, you come across a specific challenge for the first time. You’ve got all of this great gear, and you’re ready to connect it up. You might be around the desk at home, or getting ready to build up your first rack to take on a gig. Either way, you realize that plugging everything into power strips isn’t working anymore, but what can you do?

Proper Power Planning

The correct answer is proper power distribution and a little bit of planning. The price tag on many commercially available products though, consequently leaves some folks looking for alternate solutions. However, it is something that really needs to be in your budget. All things considered, you could argue that good power infrastructure is more important than the rest of your gear. Good infrastructure like cables and power, will also outlast much of your other gear as you upgrade over the years.

So where do you start? If you’re a regional sound company, you’ll be starting where the power enters the venue. A specific set of breakers or panels is often provided just for visiting production companies. It’s on you then to assess that power, connect to it and have the equipment to distribute it to every point in the production that needs it. This is not a trivial task & can involve many thousands of feet and dollars worth of cable alone to handle the loads.

Down to earth

If you’re just an individual building up one rack, your job is a bit easier. The goal is consistent, reliable and safe power that can be setup quickly. For many racks, a simple power conditioner is a popular choice for the conveniences they provide. However, when those range in price from one hundred to over a thousand dollars a unit, it’s hard to know what you need. The real priority is to make sure your gear is all safely sharing a common path to ground. As long as you accomplish that, you don’t need to get fancy. Considering the ADJ PC-4 as an example, the switches are an extra point of failure I would normally work to eliminate in any system.

However, when folks first go looking for a solution to these common problems, they see budget gear like the ADJ PC-4 & PC-100A, and they look attractive. It looks industrial compared to common home power strips, and those glowing red switches look plenty beefy. Knowing nothing about in-rush current or how power amplifiers operate, ten amps per channel looks legit & we’re off to the races. Back in the 1990’s when I was selling retail gear, conventional lighting fixtures required a lot more current than modern LED’s & folks would get into all sorts of trouble with cheap switches, learning how to power their rigs the hard way.

power to the people

I’ve seen gigs go down the toilet and other people injure themselves on stage with bad power. You will run into every possible fault in building wiring if you gig enough. There is no avoiding that. You might already be dealing with issues at home or in your building right now. Preparing to deal with those issues and expecting to find them is an important mindset to put yourself in going forward. Now that we’ve talked a bit about powering the most basic gear, we’ll get into the details of different components we need to take it to the next level in future posts.

Check out my walk-through of the Presidential inauguration sound system with Maryland Sound to see how the big gigs do it. Redundant, auto-switched power with generator backups are super cool, but they all involve the same basic goal to keep everyone safe & alive at the end of the gig. Let me know in the comments below what questions you have or if you’ve got a good story about a lesson you learned the hard way.