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Is it a good practice to keep the mixer's power on all the time? Or, is it actually going to cause unnecessary wear and tear if we keep it on while we don't need to use it? Or, does it make a no difference?

Also, when powering it down, should we turn off the power button on the back of the mixer, and not shut it down by disconnecting it from the power source (like using the switch on the surge protector)? Or, again does it make no difference?
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by wahlerstudios on Sun Nov 12, 2017 9:12 am
Today's technical equipment can handle thousands of power on's/off's, so do not waste energy. There is no "wear and tear" of technical components like 30 or 40 years ago.

I would never use a central on/off, because computers and networks need some time to boot. Active loudspeakers or amplifiers should be powered on AFTER the mixer and whatever connected to it is fully running.
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by sjc193 on Mon Nov 13, 2017 11:00 am
I leave my RM32 power switch on all the time, but I use my Furman power switch to turn it on and off. I do not leave it on all day and night though.

Lucky for me my router (ASUS RT-N66U) boots up faster than my RM32, so I can flip the Furman power switch and it will turn on the RM32 and router at the same time. After they have fully booted I will then turn on my computer. Many people can't do this because their RM boots before the router and that causes problem with the DHCP giving the RM an ip address. But, I have never had that problem.

The biggest reason that I use the Furman switch is because the way my rack is set up it is very hard to get you hand in there to flip the switch on the back of the RM. . .

I know you have a series iii mixer but the same kinds of issues would apply

Steve

StudioLive RM32AI
Rackmount Windows 8.1 PC Quad core 8G ram
ASUS RT-N66U Dual Band Router
IPad2, IPad Air 2, Studio One 3 Pro, 1 DBX Driverack 260
2 QSC KW 153's, 2 Turbosound TMS-1's
2 OHM MR450D Subs with Kilomax 18inch drivers
4 EV ZLX-12P's, 1 TurboSound iX15, 2 Yamaha S115V's
1 Crest Pro-Lite 7.5 (7500 watts) amp, 2 Behringer EP4000 amps
10 58/57 mics, 1 SM86, 1 sE8, 1 sE2200, 1 AT2020, 2 AT2021
1 beta52 kick mic, 2 e609, 2 Radial J48 DI's, 1 PRO48 DI
2 4Bar lights, 1 4Play, 1 6Spot, 1 fog machine
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by chuckgollnick on Sat Nov 18, 2017 10:05 pm
There are very few components in modern electronics that have significant physical wearout mechanisms.

Fans are the biggest offenders and StudioLive 32 has none! Woo Hoo!

Flash memories have a wearout mechanism that is based on the number of write cycles. The expected life is generally in the tens-of-thousands of cycles. Every time you upgrade the firmware in your Studio Live, you'll be taking yet another hit to your flash memory's life. Hopefully, Presonus won't be making 10,000 updates.

Electrolytic capacitors are the second biggest problem after fans and will likely be StudioLive 32's problem since it doubtlessly has them. These capacitors wearout by drying out (they literally have a water-based liquid electrolyte inside of them and no matter how well you seal them, it does eventually evaporate out). This is temperature-related. So, leaving the mixer on will accelerate this process and lower the life-expectancy of these caps. Some brands of caps are better than others. I don't know what brand Presonus has used. Ten years would be a really good life expectancy for consumer-grade electrolytic caps. This drying out of the caps can manifest itself as 60Hz hum as the filter caps in the power supply decrease in value or it can show up as decreased low-end frequency response if the caps that dry out and lower their capacitance are coupling caps in the analog preamp or output amps.

This is why, as your gear ages, you made need to change your EQ, specifically to raise up the low end. It's not that your ears are getting worse. It's not that your room is changing. Your mixer is less able to pass low-end and your power amps are less able to pump it out. Before you re-cone your speakers, try re-capping your amps.

This is why also why, when you get new gear such as a new mixer or new power amps after a decade with the old stuff, you may find that everything just sounds so much "livelier," more "tone," more low end. You may also ask yourself, "When we bought it, I thought the old stuff sounded really good. But this new gear is so much better. How could I have been so wrong?" Well, you weren't wrong. Your old gear did sound great when you bought it. It's just lost bandwidth -- especially low end -- as the caps have dried out.

Old gear can often be brought back to great sound by just going through it and replacing all of the electrolytic caps. (Several years ago, I and some friends resurrect a Hammond Cougar, Hammond's first all-electronic organ... no motor, no tone wheels. Re-capping really made a huge difference.)

Many years ago, mid-70s as I recall, all five branches of the US Armed Services where using the same precision approach radar to land aircraft. And all five where experiencing terrible reliability with these radar sets. Particularly, the radar output amplifiers weren't getting anywhere near their theoretical calculated mean-time-between-failures. The Air Force assigned Charlie Halpin to look into it. Halpin ordered every failed circuit board from the Air Force's radars to be sent not to a repair depot, but to his lab. And he and his team diagnosed each one to root cause... not just that the amp board was bad, not just that a specific transistor was bad... no... they opened to package of the transistor and examined the actual semiconductor die under a microscope to determine why it failed. And what they found every time was physical cracks in the glass passivization layer on the top of the actual transistor die. (All transistors, diodes, and IC chips have a layer of glass on top of the actual semiconductor die to keep air from oxidizing the semiconductor material and ruining it.) Halpin theorized that the glass was cracking because of thermal expansion and contraction due to cycles of heating up and cooling down, These radar sets had fans to keep the output amplifier final transistors cool, but fans wear out and fail so to meet reliability requirements, the manufacturer of the radar sets put a thermostat on the fans. The result was that the transistors would heat up above some hot threshold and then the fan would come on and stay on until the transistors cooled to below some cold threshold. This was cycling the transistors hot, cold, hot, cold, and causing expansion and contraction and expansion and contraction which was cracking the glass and allowing air to oxidize the transistor dies.

Halpin did something radical. His offices and his lab were at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio where the Air Force ran several of these precision approach radar sets. Halpin when out and just cut the wires to the fans. The surprising result was that the radars ran much more reliably. The reliability of modern, solid-state electronics is much more driven by temperature cycling than by high temperature. So, you are often better off just leaving stuff on and allowing it to just get hot and stay hot than to constantly power-cycle it creating those cycles of expansion and contraction.

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