Turning amps on and off won’t hurt them due to soft/slow startup cycle.
Calculate the cost of tubes per year makes very little sense.
Leaving tube amps on.
This is a question I had for a long time. I know it’s not a good idea to leave tube amps on all the time because of tube life and safety reasons. But sometimes I don’t have the opportunity to listen to my system / music for hours at time at one sitting. Sometimes I can only listen to it 45 min - a few hours at a time during the day / night. So my question is would it be better to leave the amps on all day / evening and listen when I can or turn them on / off every time I listen even if is only 45 min at a clip. But to just clarify when I don’t intend to listen that day/ night they will be off. Does turning the amps on / off throughout the day / night do more harm than leaving them on ? Tube life , wear and tear on amps etc. btw I have the Audio Research Ref 750s. Ea amp has 18 KT150 , 6550WE , 6H30.
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@ghdprentice Thanks for your response. I have to agree now with you. These 750s do have a slow start. And considering the options of leaving them on or off during some of my short listening sessions during the day / night I will now be turning them off. I have about 800 hrs on these KT150s and I also did buy a brand new complete matched set of tubes from ARC when I bought these amps last summer. Also I did already a tube ARC last year when I first got these amps. One of the KT150 tubes must of gotten shaken up during shipping. I think it was the very first time I played them. Scared the FK outta me. I put a post up last year about that. |
@czarivey Thanks for your response. These are my first tube amps I have ever owned. I went from a Krell FPB 600 to the ARC Ref 750s. My first day of owning them I was listening for about 10 min and had a tube arc from a KT150 tube. It sounded like an explosion with a fire and lots of smoke. Scared the FK outta me. I posted this happening on AG last year. |
This isn’t exactly applicable to your question, and what I do might not fit into the structure of your life, but I generally know, on any given day, when I will be listening, and it usually after I eat dinner. So a couple or three hours before I am going to start preparing my food I turn on my CDP and the power supply section of my pre. about an hour later I turn on the rest of my pre (which lights the tubes up) and then after a few minutes or so I turn on the big power caps of my amp and then when I start making dinner I turn on the rest of the amp which lights up the tubes and when I start eating I put on some background music at a real low level. By the time I have finished eating and cleaned up my mess my amp is pretty hot and I tell myself that sound degradation is going to be minimal. (I don’t know if it is minimal, but I tell myself so anyway.) I definitely wouldn’t leave my tube amp on all day or overnight on purpose. Not that it has never happened before. But if you can get it on an hour or so before you start listening, that may make it sound better when you do start listening. |
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