For the last few days my system has been sounding off, kinda how it used to sound before I added the Audience line conditioner, a little hard and strident at times, and the soundstage was not as expensive. At first I thought maybe I was just imaging it, or maybe my ears were off because of allergies. At any rate, my listening sessions were short and not very satisfying over the course of the last few days. I keep my system powered on all the time, leaving the BHK preamp and 250 in standby when not listening. I remembered awhile back that the power went off and came back on, and started thinking that’s probably not very good for the components to receive power when the switches where all on.
Maybe things didn’t restart properly.
So I powered all the components off, then the line conditioner, then repowered everything. When I started playing music again I was rewarded with the glorious sound I once had!
Just wondering if anyone might have an explanation for what may have happened?
Maybe it’s just a good idea to power everything off once in awhile then back on again.
Have experienced this myself, but as to why the sq improves after fully powering off everything
I haven’t a clue and restarting everything is a mystery to me. Maybe someone will chime in and shed some light on this …
At any point in the chain of events a microprocessor is introduced, that is to say any component that is software controlled, then the value of a a power-cycle can never be discounted.
I have a P20 Power plant and the same thing happens to it. On the P20 there is a “Clean” function that I’ve started to use every couple of weeks, and it sets things right again. Here is a description of what the clean function does from the owners manual…
“CleanWave
By selecting the icon labeled CLEAN the Power Plant 20 will activate the CleanWave function and the
display of the P20 will begin to countdown the time left as the P20 is applying the CleanWave signal.
CleanWave injects a series of higher frequencies that ride on the main sine wave to help “degauss”
connected magnetics.”
I have not powered down the P20 since I started using it. I wonder if doing so will have an even better sound improvement than the clean function. I guess I will need to try this soon.
So to answer my own question, is it a good idea to reboot your system once in awhile? Hell yes,
especially if you’ve had any power outages.
As I mentioned before, I was unable to listen to my system for period of time because everything sounded God awful to me. Since doing a full reboot on everything, I’ve been completely immersed in the music listening for hours at a time. I suspect it was mainly the DSD that needed to be rebooted, but I will continue to perform this ritual of rebooting everything from time to time, especially if things sound off.
Paul did a video about doing a full shutdown and a cleaning and a re-connection of all devices. I do this about every six months along with weekly reboots of my digital components. It’s good advice.
