Do you leave your DAC powered on all the time?

[AudGuy]

My experience has been that while I tend to shut everything off when not in use, it does seem to take 10 minutes or so to warm up enough that things will not change much after that. There is a difference between just turned on, and after even this somewhat brief warm-up period, but two hours later or even all day later things are about the same.

 

I have done some load testing and have determined that when everything is turned on the current draw is quite high, higher than I would have expected so I do try to be power frugal and turn the systems off when not in use.

 

The DAC though draws the least amount of power of anything in the system and while it too can shut itself down after inactivity, then it won't work if I want it to and have not remembered to turn it back on, so inconvenient. And the DAC seems to be the device that benefits from warm-up the most although this is just my assumption. 

 

As to power surges versus steady-state power use ... I leave a PC server and a couple of NAS boxes running all the time. The NAS boxes actually draw surprisingly little power and are engineered to be on 24/7 so I go with that and have had pretty good results. The PC draws more power but is very useful doing all manner of things so I tolerate it being on all the time. My first server ran (Win2000) non-stop for almost 11 years before being replaced with the current machine which I hope will do the same. No sleeping allowed ....