Do you leave your components on 24/7?

My gear seems to sound great after 20-30 minutes. This includes tube and solid state. None of my gear sounds bad enough so I can't enjoy it while it's warming up.

Standby switches could be for different reasons. On a remote controlled unit such as a CD player, remote preamp, a standby switch may shut the remote receiver section of the unit off, that is normally needed to receive the remotes signal. On a lot of tube gear, the standby switch shuts of the B+, that feeds the higher operating voltage to the tubes. The filaments would stay on in this type of example, to keep the tubes warm, without the the wear, and extra electric needed. This is just a couple of examples. The purpose of this post is, even when you have a unit in standby (typically SS), the main audio part may be shut down, and cold. These examples aren't always the case.

The link to a post Almarg pointed out covers the way it is IMO. Some electronic components (semiconductors) do not like the big thermal swings, and may fail sooner. Others may settle, and break in to the on always operation since they stay hot all the time. With this case, those semiconductors may break when they shrink during cool down, since they have never been allowed to contract during a cool down, and expand during warm up, since this is what they have become accustomed to. Think of it as a super miniature bridge without expansion joints, for thermal change, while others may handle the temp swing like a bridge. That one poster is an engineer(Almarg link) that specializes in this. And like he says, it varies from component, to component. I'd have to agree with that. It makes sense.

For those of you worrying about going to hell... Maybe one of those inventors of those little magic things that change the sound so much your jaw will drop, may figure out how to
air condition hell.

Still, nobody has mentioned what the supposed "more likely to fail" failure rate might be (any tests of this?), and I know if my amps are off they can't fail.
Wolf_garcia (Threads | Answers | This Thread)

We are fortunate enough if we get a good accurate review on the sound of a piece of gear, when the reviewers "sounds great" statement matches what we hear, and are happy we bought it. I think Consumer Reports would be the only one to test something for the cycle rate failure. I doubt we'll ever see that at the price of audio gear. It would be interesting though. We have two compact fluorescent lights in a couple of different kitchen light fixtures. Those things use about 9 watts only. Being they use so little, we just leave them on 24/7, even when cleaning them. In the daytime, the light from the skylights overpower them, and we always forget/forgot to shut them off. We decided to change the other ones to a different color temperature. During the bulb change, we shut them all off, first time after several years of 24/7 always on, one failed at start up, the other is still running 24/7, 6 months to a year later. I guess that's about a 50/50 shot? That made me wonder if the failure rate would be similar with a pair of twin SS preamps after this post? I'm guess something SS failed in the one. This comparison may be way off too. I still shut all of my gear down. It cost a lot more than the bulb.

Paperw8, This thread and post was the one I believe. [http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?aamps&1296956886&openfrom&13&4#13]

Not being an EE, I can't say for sure, but I don't think home audio even has a 100% duty cycle. Most power amps usually don't to my knowledge. So I guess it's how the engineer designed it.