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What You Need to Know
Why Furman, and Why a Power Strip from a Power-Conditioner Company?
The $25 Belkin or APC strip in the back of every office in America has done a serviceable job for 30 years. Plug your gear in, hope you don’t get a lightning strike, replace it every few years when the indicator light goes out. For a desk lamp and a phone charger, that’s plenty. For a $1,500 receiver, a 4K display, a streaming box, and a turntable, it really isn’t.
The PST series is what happens when a company that’s been engineering AC power products for broadcast studios and live-sound rigs since 1974 decides to make a power strip. The technology stack varies by model — the PST-8 and PST-8D bring the full Powell-engineered SMP / LiFT / EVS protection found in Furman’s higher-end Elite line, while the PST-6 and PST 2+6 use a simpler but still genuinely upgraded MOV-based circuit with RFI/EMI filtering. Either way, you’re getting better engineering than the commodity surge strip the buyer was likely replacing, in a form factor that fits the same cable run behind the same equipment rack.
Two things every PST shares. First, zero ground contamination: a Furman-specific circuit choice that does not shunt surge energy onto your circuit ground (the way most MOV-based strips do), so your DAC, streamer, and other digital gear don’t have garbage on their ground reference. Second, signal-line protection: every PST includes coaxial (cable/satellite) and telephone surge inputs, because lightning that comes in through the cable line will fry a TV just as effectively as lightning that comes through the wall. In our experience, a good power conditioner or low-noise power supply will almost always noticeably improve the sound of any high-end audio system, and the same engineering principles that make Furman’s higher-end conditioners audible also drive the design of their power strips.
What Makes the PST-6 the Right Pick
The PST-6 is the metal-chassis option in Furman’s entry tier. Same fused-MOV surge protection circuit as the PST 2+6, same RFI/EMI filtering, same zero-ground-contamination design — but in an aluminum enclosure instead of plastic. Two ways to think about it relative to its tier-1 sibling:
- Better build quality, simpler feature set. The aluminum chassis is rigid enough to take the strain of a tightly-routed power cord without flexing, dampens vibration that would otherwise reach the internal components, and provides continuous metallic EMI shielding around the protection circuit. What you give up versus the PST 2+6: the front-panel diagnostic LEDs and the audible surge alarm. The PST-6 has a basic power LED but no separate Protection-OK or Ground indicators.
- Six outlets, two of them wall-wart-spaced. The PST-6 is a smaller chassis than the 8-outlet models, designed for a focused install — a single rack, a TV-and-receiver setup, or a desktop station. Two of the six outlets are spaced widely enough to accommodate wall-wart-style power supplies; the remaining four are standard NEMA spacing. If you need eight outlets, look at the PST 2+6 (plastic, with diagnostics) or the PST-8 (aluminum, full SMP+LiFT+EVS).
The PST-6 is for the buyer who wants Furman’s basic protection engineering in a chassis they can trust to last — the kind of unit you set up once behind a wall-mounted TV or a small audio rack and forget about for years. Most commodity power strips in this price range are plastic; getting an aluminum chassis at the PST-6’s price point is genuinely uncommon.
One footnote worth mentioning: the engineer who developed Furman’s SMP, LiFT, and broader power-product circuit design is Garth Powell. Powell spent years refining Furman’s AC products before moving on to lead power-product engineering at AudioQuest, where his work on the Niagara line carries forward many of the same design principles. When you buy a Furman from this era, you’re buying into that engineering lineage — even at the entry level.
The Technology Inside the PST-6
Fused MOV Surge Protection
The PST series Tier-1 products use a fused metal-oxide-varistor (MOV) shunt circuit, Line-Neutral. When a surge hits the line, the MOV briefly clamps the over-voltage and shunts it through a fuse. The fuse is the smart part — most cheap surge strips have an MOV that simply degrades and silently fails after enough hits, leaving you “protected” by a dead component while the indicator light still glows green. Furman’s fused design gives a definite end-of-life signal: when the fuse blows, you know the protection is gone.
This is genuinely better than a generic surge strip, but it’s worth being clear about what it is and isn’t. It’s not the non-sacrificial SMP circuit found in the Furman Elite series and the PST-8/PST-8D — those are engineered to keep clamping after multiple large hits without sacrificing anything. The Tier-1 PST series is fused-MOV protection done right, paired with the rest of Furman’s circuit design philosophy.
RFI / EMI Noise Filtering
Beyond the surge protection, every PST includes a passive RFI/EMI filter tuned to attenuate AC line noise more than 40 dB across the 150 kHz to 100 MHz band — the frequency range where most of the contamination from switch-mode wall-warts, LED drivers, and household electronics actually lives. That filter is what separates “Furman-quality protection” from a $25 commodity surge strip, and it’s the part you actually hear on a high-resolution audio system.
Zero Ground Contamination
Older surge-protection designs shunt surge energy to circuit ground, which sounds reasonable until you realize that your DAC, streamer, and other digital sources all reference signal to that same ground. Garbage on the ground rail shows up in the listening chair as hum, hash, and a slightly elevated noise floor. Furman’s circuit design deliberately avoids this — surges are clamped without dumping anything to ground.
Build Quality and the Metal Chassis
One thing that sets the PST-6, PST-8, and PST-8D apart from most surge protectors in their price range: the chassis is aluminum, not plastic. Walk into any office-supply store and you’ll find a wall of plastic-cased surge strips — flimsy, cheap to mold, prone to creaking when an outlet fits tightly, and offering essentially zero EMI shielding. Furman’s metal chassis brings real benefits: structural rigidity that doesn’t deform under power-cord pull, vibration damping for the internal components, and a continuous metallic enclosure that contributes to RF shielding for the protection and filtering circuitry inside.
The captive 8-foot power cord is also a step above commodity practice — heavier-gauge wire than the typical 16-AWG cord on a $25 strip, with a 36-degree NEMA 5-15 plug (angled away from the wall to make installation cleaner behind furniture). Small things, but the kind of thing you notice when you’re routing a permanent install.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is this different from a $25 surge strip from an office store?
Three meaningful ways. (1) Surge protection that actually keeps working. Generic strips use sacrificial MOVs that silently degrade after large hits — your indicator light says “protected” while the protection has actually failed. Furman uses fused MOVs on the PST-6, designed to fail in a way you can detect. (2) RFI/EMI filtering. Generic strips do nothing about the noise riding on your AC line; the PST series filters that noise across the audio-sensitive frequency range. (3) Zero ground contamination. Generic strips shunt surge energy to ground, which can actually add noise to your digital sources. Furman’s design avoids that.
Which PST should I buy?
Quick guide: PST 2+6 if you want Furman protection in the most affordable form factor and you value the audible surge alarm and diagnostic LEDs (plastic chassis, 8 outlets including 2-3 spaced for wall-warts). PST-6 if you want a metal-chassis Furman in a 6-outlet configuration with the same entry-tier protection circuit. PST-8 if you want the full SMP / LiFT / EVS technology stack — same protection found in the Elite series, in a power-strip form factor with 8 outlets in one bank. PST-8D if you have a system with both digital gear (TV, streamer, AVR) and analog gear (turntable, integrated amp) and you want the two banks isolated from each other to keep digital noise out of the analog chain.
Will this limit my amplifier’s current?
For the audio gear most people plug into a Furman power strip — receivers, integrated amps, source components, displays — no. The 15-amp current rating across all outlets is plenty of headroom for typical home systems. Where you’d run into trouble is plugging a pair of high-current monoblock power amplifiers into a Furman PST and expecting them to deliver full transient performance — that’s not what these are designed for, and you’d want a higher-end conditioner with a Power Factor Technology bank (the Furman Elite-15 PFi or Elite-20 PFi) for that application. For everything else, the PST series is correctly sized.
Why are the cable and phone connectors on this thing?
Lightning that comes in through your coax cable line or telephone line will fry a TV or modem just as effectively as lightning that comes through the wall outlet. The PST series includes signal-line surge suppression for one cable/satellite coax connection and one telephone line — pass-through connectors that surge-protect those signals before they reach your gear. If you don’t have cable TV or a landline, you can simply ignore those connectors. If you do, they’re a useful inclusion that most generic surge strips lack entirely.
What’s the warranty?
Furman backs the PST series with a 1-year limited warranty covering defects in materials and workmanship. Important note: Furman’s warranty is only valid on units purchased from authorized dealers. Audio Advisor is an authorized Furman dealer, so your warranty is in place when you buy from us. Purchases from unauthorized internet sellers or auction sites do not qualify for warranty coverage.
Why Buy the Furman PST-6 from Audio Advisor?
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