The WAudio W-3900 Power Conditioner is a well-made PDU/power strip, with a couple of bucks worth of filtering components inside. If it were sold in the $50 price range, I’d definitely recommend it for its solid build quality, decent quality components, and retro looks. But at $180, the amount of power “conditioning” (it’s really just filtering certain frequencies of noise at low levels) doesn’t justify the price, IMHO.
To be fair, the product can be found on AliExpress for $137 at the time of this writing.
Though the marketing materials promise “the highest level of surge & spike protection”, in reality it is not what I would call a surge or spike protector. One weak PTC thermistor is presumably the entire justification for that line, and I’ve seen $15 power strips with more robust surge protection circuitry.
For posterity, here’s the Amazon listing as-is now, before they potentially correct it to be more realistic:
And as promised, here are some close-ups of the circuit board for those of you curious about seeing it in more detail or tracing it out:
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- WAudio W-3900 Circuit Board – Front Close-up
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- WAudio W-3900 Circuit Board – Back Close-up (Flipped)
