Re: [LAU] Delta 1010 Power On and Off (Breakout Box)

fons said:

> On Wed, Jan 27, 2010 at 05:06:44PM -0500, David Santamauro wrote:
>
> > > When I plug mine in, turning it on, the device tends to get warm
> > > pretty fast, which leads me to believe that perhaps after prolonged
> > > periods of time it might get very hot.
> > >
> >
> > Mine is on pretty much 24/7. Heat has never been an issue.
>
> Power and thermal cycles can be more damaging than just
> leaving things switched on. On first consideration it
> may seem less 'green'. OTOH, if your equipment survives
> longer before becoming toxic waste that helps as well.

Good info, except in the case of the delta 1010.
They have a history of over-heating and drying out the capacitors in the power supply in the external box.

I don't have mine hooked up right now, but I used it for years before. We got one just before alsa supported the evny chip that the delta uses*. It was one of the first ones to burn out one of it's power supply caps. After taking it apart, tracing the circuit, understanding the problem, and replacing the caps; I posted info on it here a long time ago. Others have picked the info up, added and distilled it into an easy to understand fix if the caps go bad.

If the delta 1010 is getting really hot then leaving the external unit powered on will shorten it's lifetime quite a bit.

From what I remember, the external unit powers down to a reasonable "heat' level when the computer it's plugged into is turned off; so that helps. Plugging the external's supply into a switched AC supply and leaving it off until it's needed seemed to work fine also.

I ended up mounting a small, quiet, 12v fan behind the external box on it's PS end. The fan was powered by a small 6 volt "wall wart" stile supply that was plugged into the outlet strip that the external box used(along with other sound equipment).

*about alsa back then:

I was _so_ glad when the delta was finally supported in alsa. I remember downloading and building the drivers for every new kernel that I used. I had wanted to use the oss drivers for the card, but the oss devs seemed to have big money in their eyes; thinking that they could charge big bucks for drivers for the card. What really turned me off was the total cost just to get the 1010 running on linux with their drivers; somewhere very close to what a windows license cost at the time! Now, when I see the oss guy come onto the list defending oss, or badmouthing alsa; I just shake my head and ignor them for introducing such a sad problem into linux so early on.

Tracey
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Received on Wed, 27 Jan 2010 17:41:07 -0800