It is designed to stay warm… that is a design feature, not a problem. Most good equipment I had in the past stays on all the time except for my tubed stuff. My last DAC, a Benchmark USB unit has been permanently on for eight years… seriously.
What ages a piece of electronics is “surging”, the act of turning it on. This has been a known issue from when I got into audio in the '70s and I expect it was an issue many years before that. What I don;t understand is given surging is such an ageing issue, that there are not standard “soft start” circuitry out there.
Anywho, heat is not an issue and not a concern. Besides, you will always have a component that is ready to listen to with its full capability… thermal stability is required for optimum sound quality.
I’m pretty sure some kind of “soft-start” circuitry is built into all of PSA’s components, if not also into the ICs or chipsets they may acquire from other manufacturers.
I’ve been told since the 1980s - before engineering school - that turning on and off your PC (not sure they were called that yet at the time) “stretches the circuits”, but I’ve never had any piece of electronic equipment fail on me because it was turned on and off too much (except of course if the switch itself failed - or in some older TVs the capacitors in the power supply which were easy to replace) while I’ve had numerous devices fail after a given time period from the heat they generate.
One final thing on the heat/warm issue - PSA engineers and techs as well as SMEs familiar with the inner workings of the unit frequent these forums. Can one of you please just tell us which of the internals are indeed running the warmest/hottest so we can all just go on with our lives on the topic? If I’ve missed a whole thread on this where a DEFINITIVE answer was provided, my apologies, and I’ll be happy to read it and delete this comment. But c’mon already - is there an “engineering” or “audiophile” reason that the unit runs so much hotter than other similar units and if so what is it, and which internal circuitry is affected?
Don’t own the Jr and only half pay attention to the threads; however, I’m certain Ted has answered this question in detail in past threads. Might take time to find but pretty certain it’s here somewhere.
Ted has answered this before along with the temp of the unit being well below the operating parameters of the unit. It’s here somewhere. EDIT- Found one anyway- (Read ted’s comments)
Cool. That’s what I’m talkin’ bout. I’ll look into it.
All of that said, I want to reiterate, I’m holding onto the DSJ for at least another month and am not currently WORRIED about the heat issue after reading the responses to my OP.
There is no double standard. Your are both welcome to your onions and even more welcome to express them - popular or not. But people are just as welcome to disagree with your opinions.
Our only standard is to express whatever opinion you have respectfully.
For a contemporary example, give the thread on Synergistic Research a quick read. Many different opinions being expressed, all as part of good conversation. Click
You do realize that the blue PS standby button isn’t turning off much inside the gizzards of the DSJ, which is why it remains hot in standby mode. This has been a design point of PS hardware right from their early days, the standby button just mutes the output and turns off the display. Paul has talked about this a few times before.
Well I just experienced another flaky behaviour by my Junior… This morning, the blue light was on, the screen black… I am 99% sure I turned it off last night. I just hit the blue button off, then on again, and the unit came up but the volume noted “4”. Nope, should be 100 - I NEVER touch the volume (and I never use the remote). So I reset the unit … now the unit came up but the volume now notes “80”. Nope… should be 100…so I turned the volume up to “100” and I reset again, this time after off with the rear switch, I pulled the power cable out, turned the unit on then off… somewhere I read that helps “drain” a piece of electronics… not sure if it really does, but I did it. Powered up with blue button pushed… reset… came up as “80” again. Nope, wrong again.
The unit sounds fine… but this should not happen… I love the sound and am happy with the unit… but this shouldn’t happen. I am using USB direct to my PC. Last night, my PC was on all night and it may have rebooted with a Windows update but I doubt it. Anway, I never noticed booting my PC to have any effect on these issues.
Specific to the Bridge, I was noticing that my DS Jr. was doing something very similar and I ended up tracing it back to Roon, which I had running on both a PC (core) and a tablet (for control during listening). As I’m sure you know (if you have Roon or something similar) that program has the ability to ‘wake’ the Direct Stream DACs. Further, the if the mouse pointer for my PC was left hovering over the volume ‘knob’ or the tablet was on the couch (and Roon was active on both tablet and PC) and say my wife sat down and moved it, the DAC would “wake up” and it would be on the wrong volume. This also happened overnight once or twice, but I don’t recall the exact circumstances.
I don’t suppose any of those conditions apply in your listening area?
Yeah I knew that. I think that’s a long-time PS Audio (and others obviously) design element. My DL-III of course was the same way, but since it was just a “passive” DAC, I didn’t mess with the power/standby controls very much.
In any case, I think my questions have been answered by PSA’s support staff and with their help, I’m going in a different direction to see if any of the quirks/issues I experienced with my DS JR issues can be overcome by using a different model.
There’s a misunderstanding here: there is indeed a bug in the control processor who’s most common symptom is the volume spontaneously changing to 80, sometimes other settings get trashed in other ways. Whether it’s related to the irregular loss of settings during updating isn’t obvious. I don’t really know much about it. It could be anything from powering off (or getting a power glitch) at the wrong time, some timing of commends from the remote or from the screen or perhaps some timing of changes in the status of the FPGA, etc… It is annoying.
The bridge reset was a different bug…that one sets vol = 60. I saw that a lot. I also saw vol = 80 a few times also. It is what it is. I’d rather they fix the DMP bugs first.
Nothing says that there’s only one glitch or conversely that the bridge control software (when interacting with Roon, etc.) doesn’t sometimes clobber something that gets used later and causes a problem. PS Audio support may know more.
[Edit: Brodric beat me.]
