February 2002

An Interview with Dick McCarthy of Richard Gray's Power Company: Part 1

Jeff Fritz: Tell us about your background and how Richard Gray’s Power Company began.

Dick McCarthy: For 45 years I have been an audiophile -- if a component or speaker was ever made, I owned it for a while. Like so many audiophiles, I found different is not always better. I have made so many mistakes in trading in old equipment for the latest and greatest -- tube to solid state, back to tubes -- all in the pursuit of the never-to-reach nirvana.

We are constantly aware of increasing noise on our AC lines. Therefore, we have the historical growth of power-line conditioners (PLCs). I have gone through practically every PLC ever made, and although they remove noise as claimed, without fail and after several months, I become dissatisfied with the resultant losses in dynamics. In all cases these PLCs are Band-Aids more than a cure.

Enter Richard Gray, an extremely knowledgeable audiophile, with his hands-on, workbench experience as a licensed technician and consultant to designers and manufacturers of audio and video equipment. He knows first hand about the nasty secrets of incoming AC power. According to Richard Gray, many electrical aberrations ride along on the AC sine wave that is presented to our audio and video components.

As my local audio guru and technician, Richard instructed me to remove my highly acclaimed PLC (which will go unnamed) from my front-end components because he said it was choking out the dynamics in my system. When I told him that my amps were not plugged into a PLC and asked why it was so important to remove it from the less power-hungry front-end components, he said not to argue. So he unplugged my preamp, CD transport, DAC, and low and behold, my mostly Audio Research system came alive, and the dynamics returned to my full-range electrostatic speakers (Sound Labs). Bottom line, I missed the cleanliness that the PLC offered, with its more pristine presentation, but I preferred the increased dynamics without the PLC in the system. Thus the RGPC cure.

Early in his endeavors, Richard Gray saw the need for a new approach to dealing with the quality of the electricity that fuels our homes. Ideally, if we could plug our home-theater systems directly into the utility-company transformer on our street, we would. But unfortunately, we can’t. Air-conditioner compressors, computers, microwave ovens, TVs, digital players, and other apparatus with switch-mode power supplies create noise, crosstalk, and drain power.

This continuous on-and-off cycling contaminates the performance of our audio and video components. Moreover, the great lengths of utility lines carrying electricity into our homes are subject to their own fluctuations and "hash," further destabilizing power supplies. These degradations are common to urban, suburban, and rural settings. No one is immune. Although we cannot plug into the transformer on the street, Richard Gray figured out how to get us closer to that ideal.

Richard Gray knew from his own workbench experience in the real world of AC power, standard line conditioners are wired in series through which current must travel to reach our equipment (including air-core chokes, small isolation transformers, sine-wave regenerators, and voltage regulators), yet with unwelcome added resistance that in effect moves the power further away from our systems, thereby, choking performance potential.

It was several months later that Richard Gray figured out the puzzle, came over to my house, and installed two prototypes of his invention. Within 10 minutes, WOW, my soundstage became wider, deeper, with a more palpable image, and the entire system just seemed more powerful, more effortless, more real. Richard Gray solved the elusive puzzle where others had failed. He developed a true parallel, non-current-limiting technology, which moves the power from the street and places it next to our audio and video equipment.

JF: Tell me about the company.

DMcC: Located in New Orleans, the company consists of Richard Gray, the inventor, who handles new product development and technical support, and me, Dick McCarthy, covering sales, advertising, and marketing. What started out as a small moonlighting addition to our primary sources of income has turned into a major and successful growing endeavor, with over 4500 units now in service. Transformer Manufacturers, Inc. manufactures the units under our license. We are pleased to report that their quality control has been so wonderful that we are yet to receive one unit returned defective under our five-year warranty program!

It is important to know that RGPC dealers are the lifeblood of our business, and we plan to stay the course and only sell through select dealers who service local clientele: dealers who have retail stores or by-appointment showrooms and dealers who encourage in-home evaluation and demonstration, who will visit with their customers wherever possible to fine tune our products(s) for the needs of their specific systems.

JF: Give us an overview as to how the RGPC technology works.

DMcC: Only RGPC’s patented technology restores power onto a soft AC line -- instantaneous high-current, on-demand power to satisfy the transients of power-hungry amplifiers and powered subwoofers. It is protected by U.S. Patent 6,198,643 and other U.S. and foreign patent rights pending. The evidence of this feature is documented on our website as well as at shows such as CES and CEDIA where we demonstrate the storage and instantaneous current on demand using the "Edison Test" developed by Richard Gray to prove to the world to the best of our knowledge that no other product can duplicate this performance.

RGPC’s parallel "electric flywheel effect" works cycle to cycle to overcome lapses in an AC line, filling in the gaps when demand momentarily overcomes supply in order to yield a more laboratory grade of current for increased image depth, black level, and color fidelity on video. It is wired in parallel, so electricity does not flow through our giant inductor or "choke," rather it travels past it. To our knowledge, the RGPC unit is the only reactive-parallel-interface technology to achieve storage and release of high current on demand.

This "electric flywheel effect" is a huge technological accomplishment, best explained by analogy to a mechanical flywheel (e.g., in a car) that doesn’t create energy; it helps sustain it. Our propriety design includes an extremely large inductor surrounding a unique core structure. This inductor is positioned in parallel with the AC line where it will not consume energy, which provides the straight-through path your components require. Other technologies consume energy. RGPC’s inductor operates as a reactive entity under alternating-current conditions. It resists changes in current flow by storing energy within a magnetic field.

It absorbs spikes and fills in the dips (to fill in the line when demand overcomes supply) and is similarly unique in its ability to even-out line anomalies while suppressing back-reflected EMF (electromotive force), i.e., the fingerprint of the equipment connected to it.

JF: What type of surge protection does the RGPC units provide, and how effective is it?

DMcC: Its unique technology offers a different kind of surge- and spike-suppression system. When it receives a power surge of 280V or greater and the surge is of sufficient duration and intensity to saturate the core of the RGPC’s huge inductor (wired parallel to the line), a high-quality MOV (metal oxide varister) hidden behind trips the internal 20A fast-blow fuse within the RGPC unit. This dual surge-suppression system is truly unique.

When the RGPC unit is subjected to a surge, the extremely low resistance of its inductor is quite capable of absorbing it. The advantage of this type of surge suppression is its ability to eliminate small surges, usually ignored by other line conditioners. Our non-sacrificial dual surge-suppression system is faster and always present; it actually protects its own MOV from sacrificial destruction.

Using an analogy to football, an RGPC unit has a 500-pound tackle (huge inductor) protecting the quarterback (MOV). Without parallel surge suppression playing interference, this spike would have been passed along the line to do its nasty work, be it data loss, noise on an audio system, or perhaps interference in the video picture of a home-theater system. Our technology protects the on-board MOV from destruction by absorbing spikes and noise before they get to any level high enough to cause the triggering of the MOV. The MOV is an extra layer of security. (We publish on our website actual photographs of our product’s surge suppression in action).

• Continue to Part 2

To learn more about Richard Gray's Power Company's products visit their website.

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