Synergistic Red Fuse ...

Mitch wrote,

"Geoff, I have 4, 10A fast-blow fuses in my big amp. I have a better chance of winning powerball than getting all the directions correct at the same time, and there is no f’in way I am going to sit around and try listening to every permutation."

I have some good news for you. The odds are pretty good are 2 of them are already in the right direction. You just have to figure out which ones they are. ;-). In fact statistically the odds aren’t terrible that all 4 are already in the right direction. A lot better than winning Powerball.

"Question? If AC changes direction 120 times per second or 60 cycles per second [60hz]... how then can a change in fuse orientation make a difference in sound quality if there is a constant cycle change in the flow of current? Am I missing something here?"

The current doesn't carry the signal.  Even if it did we only care about the direction toward the speakers.  We don't care about the other direction.

Okay ... Thanks for the suggestions, guys. l'll try flipping the fuses tonight. In the meantime, they continue to burn in with the CD player set on "repeat." 

While I'm at it, I want all to know that I'm  not trying to disparage SR in the least here. I think SR has come up with a fantastic product, evidenced by the raves from most here on the RED fuses. All I'm interested in is getting the most musical enjoyment out of my system (and investment). I really WANT these black fuses to succeed. As I've stated in several posts now, they show a lot of promise in various ways. I'm just looking for that same presentation provided by the red fuses ... in spades. 

So far, I have heard exactly what Charles describes in his assessment of the red fuses when I had the reds in the CD player. Not there yet with the blacks. I'm keeping hope alive.

Stay tuned ...

I’m wondering if any of those who have experimented with fuse directionality have tried simply removing a fuse and then reinserting it in the same direction, but such that it is rotated through a significant angle (such as perhaps 180 degrees or so) about the axis corresponding to its length. Or perhaps simply removing it and then reinserting it without any apparent rotation.

The point to that experiment being to determine if the differences that are perceived may simply be due to minute differences in the physical contact between the fuse and the contacts on the holder. While that may seem to be an unlikely explanation for differences that may be perceived and attributed (or misattributed) to directionality, from a technical standpoint it strikes me as nevertheless being a less unlikely explanation than the essentially infinitesimal differences in various parameters that have been reported to have been measured between the two directions in a couple of papers that have been published, for example, by HiFi Tuning.

Of course, even that kind of experiment would not rule out the possibility that other effects might be in play, such as sonic differences that are sometimes reported to result from simply turning a component off and then on a few minutes later.

Regards,
-- Al