If equipment would enter active state instead of standby state when power is applied, all devices left in standby mode in the house would be turned on after a power glitch, wouldn't it?

So, you might wake up in the middle of the night with all your devices blaring, or coming home from a trip finding the neighbors mad about you having your sound systems turned on 24/7.

This might be one reason that standby is the initial state of devices.

The correct design is to return to the state they were in before they lost power, like most desktop/server systems can be configured to do.

I think the argument is more that devices shouldn't have a standby state in the first place.

They can't be remotely activated of they don't. You just can make the standby state more efficient: a phone on standby consumes much less than a TV.

The article states this - "Well, it turns out that all this environmental friendliness is starting to trip over itself, because most devices now start up in standby mode."

Is this the best way for energy efficiency or should there be a different standard?

I'm of the opinion that devices that have a standby mode should either have an option to power on in standby mode, or remember the mode they were in when powered off. Many computer firmwares have a setting like this.

Though I think what's really missing is a reputable general standard for device control. The master/slave power board thing is a kind of hack using the most primitive kind of signalling we can manage at the moment.

In my ideal world I'd have a control panel somewhere where I could set up rules like "the sound system needs the TV to be on". Maybe the TV could even know that it should turn on the sound system it is connected to, though that's crazy optimistic for the current state of home automation.

In theory HDMI-CEC could do this, well if all your devices support CEC. You would have got chances with your homecinema though. They even have an opensourcelib now http://libcec.pulse-eight.com/ .Saw this for the first time, haven't done any AV-Projects in the past years, but maybe I give it a try

WOOOOOOW thats an awesome hack!

I used to do the power strip on/off dance for my devices until I had a PSU just straight blow up. Now I'm not so sure the 1W standby power is worth the increased risk of failure.