M4 - Leave it on? Turn it off?

[Zaphod B]

On most weekends I'll spead my guitar playing over a few hours - 30 minutes here, 30 minutes there, with anywhere from a half hour to two or three hours in between. I hate to keep turning stuff off and on but at some point I have to consider tube life.

Does it shorten the tube life in the M4 more to just leave it on, or to turn it on and off?

Or am I just overthinking it?

 

[jkdsteve]

I'm the same way...so often my M4/RM4 etc. will be on for 4 or 5 hours at a time...I usually turn the power amp off though.

 

[Paul Secondino]

The VHT GP3 preamp has a warm up feature for its tubes. So technically, I suppose a 12ax7 can suffer from cathode stripping just like a power tube but don't quote me on that. In other words, the GP3 preamp has a warm up (stand-by) mode to let the preamp tubes gradually warm up. I'm not aware of any other preamp that has that feature. And the idea behind stand by on amps is to let the filament in the tube to get nice and hot before plate voltage can be run through it. This prevents what's called cathode stripping. So ideally, you even want a preamp to gradually warm up its tubes.This means that constantly turning it on and off might wear the tubes down prematurely but I can't confirm that .

Over a period of 3 or 4 hours I might leave a preamp on but I wouldn't leave it on for 4 hours if I were only playing 30 minutes at a time. I keep a Vox Tone Lab around for that kind of stuff actually that way I don't have to power up my rig for practicing.

 

[jmgman69]

I leave mine on sometimes all day and this has been for a few years and I think I replaced the original at7 for an ax7 2 years ago and still sounds ridiculously great,that being said,I wonder how it would sound if I changed the tubes