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[John Roberts {JR}]

typical internet discussion.... now people are just making up sh_.

no problem...

JR

[Brian Jojade]

Playing devil's advocate here...
Say you run one side of an amp hard for years. That side of the amp regularly gets hotter than the unused side, potentially causing some uneven "wear" of the electrical components. This uneven wear just might cause one side to have a different response than the other. This may be undesirable versus having both sides "wear out" evenly. Obviously, more desirable would be to operate it well within its limits to extend its life as much as possible.

The differences would be SO minimal as to be not noticeable under any normal situation.  If that actually DID happen, buying a new amplifier of the same model as one that's been abused would sound different than the original. It's just not going to happen.

[Corey Scogin]

typical internet discussion.... now people are just making up sh_.

no problem...

JR

Do electrical components not degrade, changing their performance due to age, stress, or other factors? Is it exclusively work/fail for everything in the signal chain?
Serious question.

[Chris Grimshaw]

Electrolytic capacitors can and do degrade. They lose their value over time, and one in the signal path will eventually result in reduced bass response. IIRC, I replaced the caps on some speaker crossover boards and the harmonic distortion of the finished speaker dropped quite dramatically. I'd need to double-check my files to confirm that, though.

Resistors, inductors, semiconductors etc work until they don't in my experience.

Valves (tubes) also degrade during use and with heating/cooling cycles. The HiFi community puts great value in NOS valves for that reason.

Chris

[Chris Hindle]

Playing devil's advocate here...
Say you run one side of an amp hard for years. That side of the amp regularly gets hotter than the unused side, potentially causing some uneven "wear" of the electrical components. This uneven wear just might cause one side to have a different response than the other. This may be undesirable versus having both sides "wear out" evenly. Obviously, more desirable would be to operate it well within its limits to extend its life as much as possible.

I'd just bridge it to the one load, and keep "the wear" even.......
Chris.

[Scott Helmke]

Do electrical components not degrade, changing their performance due to age, stress, or other factors? Is it exclusively work/fail for everything in the signal chain?
Serious question.

Generally components degrade at their extremes of performance - more likely to burn out, more likely to behave differently at extremely high or low frequencies, etc.

Part of a designer's job is to not run components at extremes, so that variations in component tolerances don't cause variations in product specs.

[John Roberts {JR}]

Do electrical components not degrade, changing their performance due to age, stress, or other factors? Is it exclusively work/fail for everything in the signal chain?
Serious question.

I actually wrote a column about this back in the 1980s for my "Audio Mythology" magazine series. The specific question I addressed back then was it better to turn gear off over night or leave it always powered on.

Electronic components do not suffer linear wear patterns like brake pads or auto tires, some components do degrade from exposure to elevated temperature over time. One popular rule of thumb for reliability engineering is that MTBF (mean time between failure) drops in half for every 10'C nominal temperature increase. So elevated heat is bad for product reliability, but I can't imagine heating up one channel enough to make an audible difference between two channels inside the same chassis. The most obvious components degraded by temp/time would be electrolytic capacitors from losing electrolyte (while forced air cooling would reduce capacitor temperature differences inside a common chassis). Without repeating my entire column, there is one subtle use over time mechanism in solid state devices (related to metal migration), but on human timeframes solid state devices appear to work pretty much the same, until they stop working completely (fail). 

So to answer the OP's question a third time... No problem....

JR

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