I called Mondial to talk with them about pros and cons of leaving my Aragon 8008BB turned on continuously. The owner's manual says to turn it off, that it should reach operating temperature in about 20 minutes. Mondial says that if the power supply has been designed for "soft turn-on", then reliability impacts due to power cycling shouldn't be an issue, and that in truth, the transistors reach normal operating temperature in about 5 minutes. Another reason they recommend turning the unit off is protection against line transients (such as lightning strikes). Bottom line is that Mondial recommended very firmly to me turn the amp off and asserted that there's no good reason to leave a well-design amp turned on. I'll add that another point in favor of turning an amp off is that heat is the #1 enemy of electronics (reliability-wise). The 8008BB, being a class A amp, runs hot. No sense having the components cook away for no reason at all. Besides, with a quiescent power draw of around 300 watts, that's about one buck's worth of juice per day here in NY state. I heard a difference in the sound of the amp after leaving it on overnight when it was fairly new, but now that it has several hundred hours on it, it seems to take only a few CD tracks to "loosen up" after being turned on, and after that I really don't notice further sonic differences. So I normally switch the amp off at the end of the night. Steve
