Standby mode on ULS-15—why use it?
I have owned my four ULS-15 subs for at least five years and am still very pleased with their performance. Lately, I have noticed that one of the subs requires a stronger signal than the other three to “wake up” from standby mode. All four subs are meticulously gain-matched, so I would expect all four to wake up simultaneously. I even devised a test using REW in which I isolated each sub and sent a pink noise test signal, gradually raising the level of the signal until the sub woke up. For three of the subs, this occurred with a signal of -45dB, and the fourth sub required -43dB. Not a lot of difference, but when I am listening to music at reasonable levels, the fourth sub can remain asleep for quite a while.
So I decided to run another test to see whether leaving all four subs in an “always on” state actually used a significantly different amount of power. I have a power measuring device called a “Kill-A-Watt”, which measures the power consumption of an attached device over time. I plugged it into one of the subs and measured two 12-hour periods, one with the sub in the always-on state, and one with the sub in Sleep mode. Given the cost of electricity in my area, which is $0.08/KWh, the cost of running a ULS-15 with no load is approximately $1/mo. The cost for the sub running awake or asleep was almost exactly the same, indicating that I could easily solve my problem by simply setting the subs to “always on”, and not worry about power consumption.
So, anyone see a downside to running the subs always-on? Anyone else do this?
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ULS-15 (4)
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