A suggestion that I have deemed to worthwhile considering is the contention that amps,,etc are most at risk for damage when a unit is turned on. Inrush current. While undoubtedly there are electrical components in place to help counter any effects of the surge --It seems to make a lot of sense to subject units to turn on current as little as possible. That being said-- I am not leaving my tube amps on nor my s.s. amps on especially my class A amp. I do leave a Trends amp on as it is quite economical to run. It is more of a summer amp. I am leaving my 2 tuners on that are used daily---especially considering they are vintage tuners and dont want to subject them day to day to inrush current . I listen to my systems on a daily basis. My Sonic Frontiers Line 1 has a standby and I use that. If I am going away for overnight or even the entire day I usually shut it off completely. As long as I am in town I would not want to be powering it up every day subjecting the tubes to start up current of which it is known to subject tubes to more stress . Re/power line failures. I think a good portion of the high quality equipment made and even not in the higher price range comes with protection circuits for power failures and surges. They have to design this into the circuits --it is part and partial of designing a quality power supply. I recently bought a pair of Emotiva mono's and am surprised at the lengths this company has gone to in protecting the circuity for a not much money at all considering what I paid for my Pass amp on the used market. . I leave the Emotivas in standby and have been using them primarily in my main system as of late. This with a $5k plus (new) Pass amp sitting idle.
Reliabilty, Keeping Equipment Powered on or off?
I generally keep my system components powered on because the system does not have to "warm-up" when I sit down for a listen. I do know that reliability is usually calculated by POH (power on hours) however this calculation IMHO is a broad brush stroke. I do power down certain components that are not required to be left on to sound their best, such as a Luxman T-117 tuner and
Wadia 171i Dock
. However, my Krell IA, with the volume turned all the way down runs pretty hot, so hot you can't leave your hand on it. When turning the volume up on the Krell to reproduce the live event sound level, you can fry an egg on it, so I can only guess the Krell was designed to handle this kind of heat? However, back to the other components, such as DAC, SACDP, Headphone Amp, etc. Is keeping everything turned on asking for trouble or is leaving it on best to prevent thermal expansion and contraction which may be detrimental?