leaving equipment always on vs. off
Reading about pluses and minuses of leaving electronics at home on vs. off. I typically leave all my computers on, but turn off the stereo stuff. There are reasons to leave your HT on as well (below), just trying to weight in the extra power consumption.
"Electrolytic capacitors require some significant amount of time to fully stabilize, not just hours, but days of continuous exposure to nominal operating conditions.
An electrolytic capacitor actually has some of the characteristics of a battery, in that it contains an electrolyte, and works partially via electrochemical action. The dielectric layer on the chemically etched aluminum foil plates has to fully form and stabilize before the leakage current will go down to rated specs, and for the dielectric to reach full breakdown strength.
During the dielectric forming process, the capacitor will not perform normally, charge and discharge may be asymmetrical, the DA effects may be much higher than normal, the device may not have fully reached rated capacitance.
This forming process can take anywhere from hours to days of continuous on time, as well as several charge/discharge cycles to fully stabilze. After having been left off for anywhere from several hours to several days, the dielectric will begin to degrade slightly, and the forming process will need to occur to some degree all over again.
Leaving equipment on all the time avoids these effects, and maximizes the stability of the electrochemically formed dielectric.
There are other effects involved with elelctrolytic capacitors, but this is the main one. Note that there is an initial burn-in, and subsequent burn-ins after the equipment has been turned off for awhile.
Some designers still use electrolytics in the signal path, directly affecting the sound, other locations such as power supplies, and servo circuits also have their sonic effect. Virtually every piece of electronic equipment has electrolytics in the power supply."
06/06/02010 11:27 AM
