Subject: BASE On or Off?
From: "Saved by Windows Internet Explorer 8"
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2010 16:40:03 -0700

Leave It On or Off?

Should you leave a piece of gear On all the time or turn it Off?

Turn it OFF !!!

Why?

For the first thing, you'll be saving electricity, which is a good thing.

Secondly you avoid any possible damage should the piece of gear electrically
fail while you're not there......

in an actual example a studio in my area left all their equipment On all the
time.... there was a failure in his 2 inch tape recorder's Motor Drive Amp and
the machine went into full torque on the supply motor. It ran that way for 3
days until the owner came in to do the next session!!!!

I've seen very poorly designed power amps put out DC directly to speakers,
power supplys can fail putting out huge voltages and burn up ICs and whole
cards....and so on, so it's just safer if you turn all the equipment Off when
you're gonna leave for the day.

Of course if you're just leaving for a few of hours, I'd leave it On......

The idea of leaving gear turned ON all the time comes from the days of tube
equipment. For tubes you've got to let them warm up and reach their normal
operating temperature, and even then you'd have to wait until it quieted down.
Rather than wait an hour for all this to happen (and the corresponding movement
of the tube's filament during turn-on and turn-off) we just left the gear On all
the time.

But todays gear doesn't need warming up (of course you should be running tape
on your analog recorders as you're tidying up the studio and before you start to
align the machine.... say running 10 minutes of tape should do it in the morning
if the machine's been Off...)

Yes there is some minor stress on the Power Supplies, but it's really minor
in a well built unit.

Of course you'll want to have a shut-down procedure so there aren't huge pops
in the monitors as you turn it all off....

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