Thank folks, for all the comments on this. I'll be turning off my amp from know on (aside from unforseen reboots). As vara s th audiophile vs. music lover debate, i agree whole heartly. I'm both. I'm a music lover 'cause i love the music first and foremost. I enjoy having rather esoteric taste from metal to folk, to classical, to blues. I love music and have been a singer many times in this life. oh, yeah, choral music, can;t forget Trinity College Caimbridge. :) The audiophile side of me lives side by side with music lover. I could care les about the branding, the fancy heavy feel knobs (a la Mark Levinson), the fancy looks. What i want is to hear every last bit (literally) of the music that i love. I enjoy the differences in the way it is produces through different systems. I'm not oafter th holy grail of "close as possible to live production", after all, most live production I heard was aweful. I enjoy the art of it. Both the music lover and audiophile in my HATE the compression that is done on cds. It kills me to think of the music i am not hearing just to make the whole thing sound louder and more exciting to your average listener. You know, the kind of person who uses music a background and thinks that mp3 are ok. No offence menat, but i'm just not that kind of person. I love DVD-Audio and SACD and hope that one of 'em becomes the standard. As a computer user, I prefer DVD-Audio, as it's easier to deal with. My dream system is a good sound card directly into a good class D amp (i just lost my audiophile status right there !), with Sound Lab MB-1 speakers. These are monsterous electrostats that actually reproduce the entire fequency range including below 20hz. You won;t find them on teh soundlab web page, but i got to hear them. It kept me high for days. I want some. After all thier only about $17k a pair. Well, i can dream can't i? Happy listening, Bearcat M. Sandor It occurs to me that most musicians are interested in sound quality. However, some audiophiles are more interested in the science of sound rather than actually listening to music, and I find this very dull. You can tell people like that if they spent a lot on hi-fi but don't have any good records, or choose records because they show off the equipment rather than because they like the music... As I understand it, cheaper amps have a built-in anti-thump circuit, but audiophile amps don't because it would interfere with the signal path. So I'd recommend always dropping the power amp level to zero before rebooting your box. Cheers Daniel