Difficult to say without opening it up and seeing what it is made of. That said, based on its size likely provides surge protection and power filtration. The power filtration usually consists of capacitor in parallel which shunts noise spike to ground. That in itself usally does not intefere with sound quality. Sometime it also has inductors in series that pass 60 Hz and block higher frequencies. They work well in theory, but to my ears I do not like as much as nothing at all. For reasonable priced strips, I like the Wiremold Legrand hospital grade outlet strips which I use on my headphone setup and they are fine. I use an older PS Audio regenerator for my 2 channel system, which I like. My advice would be to try it in and out of the system, sit with it in your system for some time before swapping and see what you think.