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Details on wiring my house for sound

Thanks for the responses to my previous thread. More questions, however. I have a Square D fuse box with six sockets. Some are fitted with the Fusestat devices. I presume these are NOT best, as they involve another layer of contacts. Anyone with experience with these. Also, the box says to use only copper wire, but the contacts in the sockets look to be aluminum and are raised. Should I look at other boxes? I know Sq D is high quality and the box is quite heavy. Thanks for any thoughts.
jphilips
bob_bundus
1,834 posts
 
Jp that box should do you fine; congrat's on picking fuses over breakers. Those Fusestat's are actually resettable screw-in breakers; notice the small pop-out in the center for resetting when they trip. There are OK for non-audio loads but use real fuses (not glass body) for the sound system.
Those socket contacts are apparently plated with something; not to be concerned (whatever it is) they built the box & specify copper wire only so they know what they're all about.
jphilips OP
27 posts
 
Bob,

Thanks for your post. My fusestats are actually fuses and not breakers, but I won't use them anyway.
queg
55 posts
 
Umm.. just happened to browse this post, and could use some info. I have a dedicated circuit for my audio recepticles, in my Square D breaker box.. and was going to go further and create a dedicated subpanel for audio.. are you saying breakers are noticeable worse then fuses for audio?
bob_bundus
1,834 posts
 
Not sure what you have there then? Maybe these are time-delay fuses vs. fast fuses? Time delay elements look somewhat more complicated than the fast-blow types, they usually have a spring & some other stuff in there. They are intended for motor applications (refrigerators, washers, dryers, furnaces, etc) where the motor's startup current surge would fail a fast-blow element. I recall time delay fuses being called Fusetron's sometimes. I have not compared these to standard fuses when used for audio, but they might be OK.
An alternative approach when fusing a motor device is to overfuse it so the surge current won't fail the element, but this offers poor protection. Similarly, fusing a non-reactive load with a slow-blow fuse offers poor protection but it might, still just sound fine.
I only advise against glass body fuses because they sounded not that good in my own experience. Ceramic is definitely good (if you can find them anymore - please grab a couple boxes for me if you do find 20 amp ceramic fast fuses). Lately I've beenusing the nerw plastic body fuses but haven't yet made any hard comparisons against the one ceramic fuse that I still have left.
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