Is Smoking Really That Bad For Audio Equipment?

Yes, vaporize!
No tar, no smoke, no combustion, no irritants... just pure vapor.
No cancer, no bronchitis, no emphysema, no stroke, no heart disease...just pure pleasure.

I was at a friend's house listening to music when his amp started smoking. He immediately turned it off and sent it to its room without dinner. He said he would not tolerate smoking in his house :)

If you think the heaters have a diverse effect on your gear, wait till one of you "toqemasters" spills the bong water!

In my line of work, we have a policy that states, whenever the smoke has been let out of one our machines, the plc must be rebuilt! Smoke is bad.

I can't answer that question from a strictly audio point of view, but I can tell you that I used to have a PC repair business and serviced some computers at smokers' homes. It was disgusting. At times I took PCs outside in the middle of winter just so the smell didn't nauseate me.

The most common problem I found in smokers' computers was malfunctioning RAM and CPUs - two of the most sensitive pieces in a computer. While the smoke particles didn't actually affect the parts themselves (at least not enough to cause serious errors), it fell into the mounting slots and reduced the connection. After I opened up and cleaned the innards of the PC it ran better. Audio equipment has similar characteristics of electronic boards and cables being mounted into other boards.

I wouldn't worry about the audio equipment though. What about your health?

It's been many years since I was involved with this area as a science, but IIRC, nicotine is bad for that most important piece of audio equipment, the chochlea, aka inner ear, that piece of equipment that transduces the fluid dynamic movement of the hair cells into a synapse eventually perceived as sound.

There is debate about whether we are monaurally phase sensitive, but we are demonstratively binaurally phase sensitive, so you want to keep hearing in both ears intact.

db