On a side note, I had the joy of experimenting with liquid nitrogen-dipped leds this week, they get much more intense when cooled!
For computers, I recall a figure loosely remembered as 10C drop in temp will double lifespan. If you have experience in building computers, you may be well are that the STOCK setup is extremely inferior to aftermarket coolers, although with the new high end procs Intel is including a decent cooler. For performance purposes, your heat threshold is directly related to overclocking stability (i.e. a stock cooler will overclock much less than a good cooler with plenty of surface area). The reason for this is price-- Intel switched to a half-sized heatsink a few years back-- roughly half the material will save roughly half the cost. Surely the Blackstar folks had this same thing in mind--- save themselves dough by not including finned heatsinks. Taking that into account, you can buy heatsinks to mount to that aluminum plate and this will greatly improve heat dispersion. To illustrate, imagine applying heat to a metal plate-- if you view it in infrared there will be a circle of heat radiating out from the point the heat is applied. Assuming this is something just barely too hot to hold your hand against, if you were to add a heatsink you could hold your hand against it all day.
Someone plz pass along that infrared temp info too, they're only 20 bucks on Newegg, I use mine everyday!
Also, you can buy heat-sinks from newegg and many others.
Thanks for the response dunit, if they weren't closed on weekends I'd just call em saturday, but I noticed that pricing issue too, was hoping for a break haha! I'll try to find out on Monday about that UFO model.