I remember reading an article many years ago about this subject. The biggest concern this article said was with transistors, after thousands of cycles of turn on and off, (heating up, cooling down) the body of the transistor would start to develop microscopic cracks, which would cause it to eventually fail. I have no proof of this as all I can go by is what I read in this article. YMMV. |
Temperature cycling is a common method for testing component reliability and life testing. Most if not all discrete electrical components last longer when temperature cycling is minimized or avoided altogether. |
FWIW, A wise, very experienced electrical engineer once told me that all electronic gear is designed to run hot. Going from hot to cold & back again is the greatest stress on the gear. Then there's the cost of the electric bill to consider.
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Break in always helps, as you already noticed, especially if there’s an internal DAC |
The reason I ask is that it seems to be sounding better after a couple of days.
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Question.
Do streamers have to break in the way everything else does? |
I thought it might mr_m. The reason I put mine in vacation mode is there might be a couple of days go by when I don't use it , I still spin CD's and sometimes I would have to power cycle it anyway to reset the ip address. |
I tried touching the play/pause on the older Node2 for five seconds. Works on this model too. |
I have a 15 year old Velodyne sub and it's never been off, except for power outages.
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I leave my modified Oppo Sonica on all the time, except I unplug it when doing more critical listening to CD or LP... |
I’ve never understood the recommendation about leaving things on all the time. It seems that cooling things off would be a good thing. I understand it more for tubed gear, because the tubed amps that I have had did take a while to warm up, but then Tube life would be adversely affected, but I also had Tube bias issues with a preamp and it seemed subjectively to me that leaving it on while not playing increased the chances of Tube drift. When I had an anolog rig I had phono Pre amps that were plagued with hum and ground loops and they absolutely would get louder the longer things were turned on. Anyway, I now power everything off except my Bluesound Vault2 and two Node2 units. With Bluesound the units have to be powered up and down as a group or else they won’t play nicely together
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Every audio source except tubes should always be left on
if you want the best SQ. or so I am told. |
With my Auralic Aries Mini I always sign out of the Lightning DS controller app but leave the device on 24/7 no issues after over a year.
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And, thankfully, DAC's don't consume much power. Considering how we are gouged here on Long Island.
B |
Thanks, all.
I’ll leave it on, even though it does have a switch. |
The folks at Ayre also recommended leaving their DAC's on 24/7.
They said it doesn't wear anything out, but gives better sound with the circuits warmed up.
Bob |
One of the main guys at Auralic, Xuanqian, indicates that he never turns off his device (or put it on standby). He just sets the screen as auto off and leaves it always on. Their devices do not have a true standby since it doesn't actually reduce power consumption. So they just call it sleep. I follow his lead and leave my Auralic Vega always on with screen set to auto off. I also have Node 2 that I never power down.
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Interesting. Didn’t know that.
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Not sure I never had the node 2. Actually I hold for 5 seconds not 3 and it's called vacation mode , I assume it's powered down as it will not respond to the app until I wake it up by touching the play / pause again on the unit. |
djones51.
Is that a new feature of the Node2i? Can you do that with the older Node2? |
I power down my Node2i at night before bed. You hold the play / pause in the center of the top control for 3 seconds to power it down. |
My Node2 has been on for the past 2 years....Actually, it doesn't even have an on/off switch. |
