Pros and cons of leaving your DAC on 24/7

As for how stuff sounds from a cold start, to xx length of time..I find my amp and various preamps sound best after a few hours. from a cold start.                
And the amp, if from sitting for a few days, takes a whole day to sound it best. I do leave turned off one preamp I use just or the phono section. It stays off weeks at a time. And takes about two hours to really sound it's best. My latest tube preamp (Audible Illusions 3A) has a standby which keeps the tubes warm. And it sounds pretty good within minutes of turn on.

Elizabeth

Were  you serious about the anti-static foam?.......If so why, never heard of that.

I have no idea why no one else has done it? It was originally a comment in Stereophile from the correspondent in Belgium(?) years back. mentioning stuffing antistatic foam to reduce digital grunge. it really only seems to affect the highest frequencies, the HF digital glare/grunge. (the idea is to absorb the RFI EMI generated by the chips inside the case so that stuff does not affect the signal) Maybe no one can hear it? I tried it on my DAC. At least ten years ago. Then I bought another DAC and did that one too. The Black antistatic foam, not the blue! Used it for a long time like that.I wrote about it several times over the years. But, no one ever followed up on it as far as I know. If I had an audio business, I would have designed a soft plastic tray to fit into various DAC cases with the foam prefilled. So it could slip into the case easily, a wire trailing out to screw to the chassis to ground it. No one seems to be interested, Worked for me ****************************************************************
The other tweak is higher AC frequency. a LOT harder to implement since you need a regenerator which can up the AC frequency. Only one which could do it was the PS Audio "P" series back from ten fifteen plus years ago. Some had a optional board allowing the change in AC frequency. Rare now, and hard to find. One alternative would be 400Hz airplane AC. (All commercial airliners use 400Hz AC frequency on board the plane for AC power. There ARE ground based 400Hz AC converters one can buy (check eBay).. Paul McGowan of PS Audio experimented with alternate AC and found 400Hz to be the ideal highest Hz to use on audio equipment anyway. Personally if I had a lot of money I would own a couple of 400Hz ground based airplane 400Hz AC devices to play around with. As is, all I can do is max 120Hz from my PS Audio P-600 regenerator. I use AC 110 Hz for all my digital gear.The higher AC frequency is another idea I first got from a Stereophile article years ago, and reinforced by Paul McGowan’s experiments. You can find a uTube video of him talking about higher AC frequency. Here is a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np--y3Kfy28 ...Enjoy!

Now that you mention it, I think I do recall that being mentioned years back in an article, but at the time I didn't pay much attention. When I was still working, career technician, we used to have sheets of the stuff that IC's, etc. came in on....Retired now or I'd snatch some up, probably be able to find it easily enough on line............Also, I recall the 400Hz thing........Don't see myself buying a regenerator any time soon though, unless I found one used on ebay :)

As for leaving gear on, as long as it is able to "breath" with good ventilation, and doesn't get more than warm, should be fine. Excess heat kills electronics. We never tested anything unless it had been on a minimum of 30 minutes, preferably longer, to stabilize. Test equipment was never turned off, except over long holidays. 

 My larger power amp tends to run hot , but only when I'm listening to music, so I picked up a low noise, 18db, 120mm PC cooling fan, built a simple frame for it and set it on top of the amp. Looks fine and keeps the amp cool no matter how hard I push it..........If anybody is interested, the fan is a Noctua......Austrian made, NF-S12A.......less than $20. Very quiet, barely hear it even in a quiet room. That with a 12 volt wall wart and heat problem is gone.

ejr

I don't know what your system is, but leaving it on, at idle, isn't going to add more than a couple bucks a month to your bill. I doubt that you'd even notice the difference month to month, gear off or gear on.

I can say my system adds to my electric bill. About as much as my air conditioner. $15 to $25 a month) And the air conditioner has to remove all the heat generated by the stereo too. So leaving the stereo on 24.7 in Summer you pay DOUBLE. Once for having the electronics on 24.7 then again for removing the added heat from said electronics via the air conditioner. If you pay for your heat in Winter, then you save money, since the heat added from the stereo SAVES money on the heating bill