Is it best to leave gear on or to shut it off?

anything with a microprocessor in it should be disconnected from your power source or at least put in standby; you would never want your computer to deal with a brown out and stereo equipment these days is unfortunately very sensitive to dust, heat, cold, power deviations, and lunar and solar influences (okay, not those!). never leave a cd in your player- a power interruption will cause major havoc, even lock-up, if the cdp tries to figure out what to do with the disc. saving electricity is a very good idea as your power company may be contributing to environmental degradation. OTOH, DACS AND PREAMPS usually benefit from staying on all the time. this is a great argument for an all-analog stereo system come to think of it...

Here we go once again. NOT ONCE has anyone cited scientifically that powering well made equipment up and down causes damage or degrades performance. Plus, all equiment is more vulnerable to damage powered up but unattended.

Yeah, sure it needs a little warm up, that's normal, but much can be accomplished in 20 minutes. ;-)

Save energy and your sanity. If you aren't listening to it, turn it off.

On all the time, get a Hybrid car and recycle if you feel guilty.......but if it is SS or even a tube pre I leave everything on 24/7. My gear isnt exactly vintage but isnt new either, I only shut off if out of town or in Thunder Storms.

I don't think it's a question of vintage vs. modern, but solid state vs. tube.

I kept my Bryston amp and pre-amp on almost 25-years and it sounded great all the time. I wouldn't do that with tube equipment, since there's more likelyhood of a tube failure and the lives of tubes are relatively short.

I'm turning off my Conrad Johnson solid state control amp after listening. It's got a couple of LED displays and some switching features that worry me. The Bryston pre-amp was passive and the amp didn't even have a power switch.

Generally I think it's a personal decision.

Dave

Hi Mlsstl. Thanks for the very helpful response. I found that there are many answers. I also found out that tubes might be right for me. The amount of time my system is on I would be going through about two sets of tubes per year.