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Gear in

I run all solid state gear. When not in use, I leave my pre-amp on and muted 24/7. My CDP and mono power amps all have a stand-by mode that I keep them in when I am not listening.

Though when in stand-by, the sections that affect the sound are kept warm, I am convinced that my system still sounds better after it has been playing for 30 minutes or more...better frequency extension, warmer-more natural mids, better dynamics and overall synergy/realism.

Has anyone else found that keeping their idle SS gear in stand-by mode doesn't keep their gear at 100% performance and it does improve as it "warms up" ?
barrelchief
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timo
610 posts
 
Absolutely! Idle does not keep your system at 100%. Most likely as in my amps, idle doesn't allow current to run to the output transistors thus saving power and heat.
albertporter's avatar
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albertporter
4,949 posts
 
Agree with all the above and add that your source, interconnects and especially your speakers benefit from the warm up period as well.
sean
6,231 posts
 
Albert: Most dynamic speakers will perform worse as they heat up. This is both measurable and audible and may be one of the reasons that drivers that are highly efficient can sound better in some respects i.e. they don't need as much power so they don't heat up as much. On the other hand, E-stat's tend to sound noticeably better after you've powered them up and fed them some juice for a while. Sean
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albertporter
4,949 posts
 
Regardless of the individual drivers, the caps, wire, inductors and all the interconnect cable benefit from a little music passing through them.

I have owned many cone speaker systems and they always improved with signal. Anywhere from forty five minutes to a couple of hours, depending on the equipment I was using at that time.
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marakanetz
5,473 posts
 
Albert,
If DC offsets are turned off in stand-by mode from the output devices than I see less sence leaving an amplifier on all the time.
The 75% of wormup time takes to establish DC offsets and getting an output devices to the higher temperature. Shutting off DC supply from output devices means leaving them cool.
I implemented stand-by mode simply by embedding 50W/10Ohm dummy load resistor and extra signal binding post with two-way switch.
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