Re: Peavey IPR2 amps?
I need to preface this with the caveat that I have never seen inside an IPR, or even been in the same building as one. I am not surprised to learn of people hearing different "official" advice from Peavey. This is the nature of having more than one employee. If we really want to know we could ask the actual design engineer (probably JD).
I just downloaded the owners manual and do not see any special instructions about regularly cleaning the amp. If these amps were unusually sensitive to internal tidiness, I would expect some mention in the OM.
I am aware of things like this being a known consideration for amp designers inside Peavey (at least it was over a decade ago). I recall discussions many years ago about an alternate more efficient heat-sink approaches that we dismissed because they were notorious for clogging up with dust and not being effective the way Peavey customers are inclined to use amps.
I do not doubt that Marty has encountered some funky dirty CS800 old soldiers in his numerous 3rd world travels.
I can imagine crud inside an amp being a failure issue if the environmental contamination was electrically conductive. In general non-conductive dust that interferes with heat transfer would likely just cause the amp to thermal cycle, not die. Since the amps are probably engineered to be very hard to kill, perhaps conductive contamination is a major vector for the few that do fail. Dirt and moisture (or liquid and dirt) could be conductive, but in general we try not to expose much high impedance active circuitry to the forced air flow.
Perhaps the IPR series is different but I do not see any indication in the OM that special attention is required.
As Josh said it is good practice in general to periodically clean all amps that get exposed to dirty environments.
JR
PS: This is perhaps another reason why most fixed install amps use passive cooling when they can. They tend to collect less detritus inside.
