BillFitzmaurice.info

Good day,

I know a lot of Home Theater / Hifi Components have a 12V trigger to power on / off. Is there a similar "standard" for Pro Audio? One of my side projects is pre-amplifiers, and it looks like the same 12V trigger is sometimes used. My google-foo is letting me down. Have any of you come across an actual standard? It's a little bit expensive to integrate something like this on a PCB because it requires IO, and anything IO related means a bunch of environmental safety components, so I might just ignore it and use the old power switch. However my mantra is search, ask, share, so I searched and didn't find a good standard, now I'm asking. Have you come across anyone using MIDI or something to put things to sleep?

Search engines are awful anymore.

Best, and thank you!

The only concern with separate power amps is to turn them on last, otherwise turn on transients from the gear before them can cause thumps. By the same token turn them off first. HT AVRs do this by themselves, it's why there's a delay between when you turn on the power and sound is heard.

Power amps (Powered Speakers) - Last On/First Off

Especially if using a Driverack....they will pop.

Also, in running live sound - always mute your channels before shutting down the board, that way there won't be any open signals happening when you turn everything back on......especially if you have any phantom powered mics!

Thank you, great advice, and I agree.

I'm asking a slightly different question. People use things like this super expensive gizmo that puts out a 12 volt logic high / low. I was wondering if you've seen something like that in Pro Audio. Generally Pro Audio seems to be a free-for-all of competing proprietary specifications to drive vendor lock-in and thus sales. So if there was an open standard "IEC-something" to power appliances on / off, then I was thinking to adopt that in my circuits.

EDIT: Probably AES-something

It's for HT components that don't have an on/off switch.

Ok, here's a scenario, tell me if it's useful or trash.

As a sound guy, I want one switch so that I can turn all my equipment on/off.

We've had a few gigs where the sound guy forgot to turn something on... Like the subwoofer amp rack... Seems like if that was part of the "audio network" then the equipment could turn itself on. Maybe it's not an issue.

You'd need a power strip that will sequentially turn on/off the components, with the power amps last to go on, first to go off. If such a thing exists I'm not aware of it. Making sure everything is working is what sound checks are for.

I'd go for seperate curcuits that are switched on/off in the correct oder...lot of hardware has mute-functions to have it turning on w/o unhappy noises.

The "remote" switch aspect is as far as i know not used anywhere in that segment; rather data-linking like dante networks but not the powering part...