Well, I have to say I’m pretty impressed with the Quantum Black fuse.
I put just one in my Arcam FMJ 23 and just wandered into the room a little while ago after giving it 5 days to break in. Pulled it out of mute and was immediately smacked in the face by the sound of the orchestra sitting in their chairs waiting for the next number to begin. The noise floor is significantly improved over the Red. In fact, between the SR20 and the Red, I heard a slight improvement in the noise floor, but this time, I didn’t have to listen for it: it was waiting to ambush me.
Strings sound much better on this version than on the Red, as well as the ambient information. I was listening to a Mercury Living Presence CD from the second boxed set. There’s a cd called PT Barnum and this was cut 19, which has a pause in it. I un-muted it right before the pause, and in the silence (which is a very LIVING silence, not just the absence of noise), you hear the air coming into the microphone - and very fluidly at that, so you hear almost a "harmonic silence." It is easier to identify it as the Eastman Rochester hall. But in any good hall, if you close your eyes during a concert, you can still tell there are people around you and "hear" the air in the hall - even in the silences between numbers - as a living, breathing presence, for lack of a better phrase. And I THINK, compared to the SR20,which I had in the Arcam, there is almost no glare on the brass, which may be more a function of the microphones Mercury used.
Although I liked the SR20, and then the Red (which, in my system, wasn’t that great a difference in the places I used them (CD player mostly, although also in integrated amps), the Black shows its true colors…make that absence of color, since Black is the absence of color. It’s more like an absence of colorations, but I’ll have to listen more to discern what it is doing and what it is not doing. But it’s the first truly impressive fuse, and I’ve had Hi Fi Supremes, Audio Horizon, AMR, Synergistic, Furutech (my least favorite: I find Furutech has a distinct sound to it, one I am not liking in anything in my system including power cords re-terminated with Furutech connectors: they seem a little bright and cold in a solid state setup and diminished in the mid bass, a failing I cannot overlook).
I'll try these in my PS Audio Power Plant next, although I haven't found the fuses to be quite as obvious in the Power Plant, which is not to say I can't hear what different fuses do in that location. I can. It's just that it doesn't seem to do that much to the music itself, as in allowing more information to come through, or drop the noise floor as much. In the Arcam, it is, hands down, better than any fuse that preceded it, simply because it took no time whatsoever for me to tell how much more like a mike feed from the Metropolitan Opera on Saturdays it "sounds" (or doesn't sound) like. Quite impressive.
