To turn off or not to turn off, that is the question.

[MBlom]

Quite often I walk up to my instruments for just a few minutes of playing. I like that, but with the Voyager this turns out to be an issue since it takes a while for it to get in tune. Haven't got any idea of how long yet. What I was wondering about is whether I can keep it on during the day or evening that I spend home without electronics being worn out too fast.

[thealien666]

Electronics don't really "wear out" by being powered-on. Except when there are mechanical parts like motors or solenoids, or relays. There are exceptions like vacuum tubes, microwave oven Magnetron, LEDs (although they can last a long time), neon lights, and such which all have a limited life expectancy. None of which are part of a Voyager, except the electroluminescent backlighting on selected models. But by turning it all the way down as much as possible, you will extend its life.

If your Voyager ever has to fail, due to weak or poor quality electronic parts, it can do so even if you power it only a few minutes per month.

In fact, the momentary surge of powering on a circuit is often enough to have "weak" parts fail right then and there, regardless of how long you have been using an electronics device.

Each and every Voyager than Moog Music builds has to go through a "burn-in" period of several hours of continuous power-on state to reduce the possibility of early failure due to weak parts. And, as you've mentioned, you need to have your Voyager "warmed-up" before you can rely on its stable tuning anyway.

So don't worry, your Voyager was meant to be played, not to only be displayed.

[MBlom]

Ok. Though capacitors are something that wear out and old mixers benefit from them being changed. I recall someone mentioning that capacitors wear out more when the aparatus is turned on and off more than staying on, due to the former interacting with water in the air to cause corrosion.

[thealien666]

Electrolytic capacitor do wear out with time, and faster with heat which tend to dry up the liquid electrolyte inside. But high quality ones can last for several decades. And applying power to them does not wear them out faster. In fact, it helps to maintain the chemical properties of the electrolyte by having current pass thru them.

A electrolytic capacitor that has been in storage for a very long time, or inside a device in storage, will have lost some of its capacitance and can even be damaged by suddenly applying power to it.

[MC]

Extreme heat degrades electronics. If your space where the Voyager resides is cool and the Voyager doesn't get hot on its own, you should be safe.

[thealien666]

Extreme heat degrades electronics. If your space where the Voyager resides is cool and the Voyager doesn't get hot on its own, you should be safe.

That reminded me of the peculiar design of the Moog Prodigy's oscillators. I find it strange that Moog engineers would use one of the transistors inside the LM3046 to heat-up the chip to 55 C (131 F) internally which might not be very hot, but still is not cool either. I know that some other music chips use this kind of design (SSM2033 comes to mind) to achieve better current stability and lower oscillator drift but, as you stated, heat is the number one enemy of electronics.

In my many years of fixing electronic devices, I've seen a lot of them having been damaged by overheating. From CPUs to power transistors, display driver chips, and voltage regulators (although they're supposed to have internal overheat protection it doesn't always work), and switching type PSU.

Personally, I'd rather have a precision passive temperature monitoring compensation system than an active one where you heat a component to a known temperature and then maintain it. The latter is sure to reduce the life expectancy of that heated component.

All that being said, I just cross my fingers so that all four SSM2033 in my Korg Mono/Poly will still last a long time. And that is one exception where the less often the synth is powered-on the longer it should last.

[MC]

I've seen rectifier diodes get hot enough to bake the PC board with the telltale brown burn, but never seen that with 3046s cooking at 55degC.