Synergistic Red Fuse ...

Moopman wrote,

mapman
13,054 posts
03-28-2016 11:48am
"Geoff,

"Last Tweak Syndrome" is an interesting theory. Who came up with that again?"

Three guesses. The first two don’t count.

Moopman also wrote,

"Its definitely what’s best for business."

I’m sure you’re just being paranoid. You know how I eschew tooting my own horn.

Geoff Kait
Machoman Dramatica

This might be a timely article I came across over at High Fidelity.
In it, the author points out that all common fuses are welded with nickel
elements and that is a bottleneck, or sorts, to good sound. Also, there is a vibrating element that needs to be addressed with the wire in the fuse as current is passed through it.

Maybe he’s onto something.

All the best,
Nonoise

Rave on fuse heads! Mass hysteria aside, I suppose I'll simply wait for a reasonable explanation as to WHY a fuse would make what ardent promotors feel is such a huge improvement…somehow, based on the artful (or not so much) dodging of any basic technical question along these lines, I think I'll be waiting a long time. So far the primary response has been to utterly ignore such questions and gesture wildly in the direction of astonishingly fabulous subjective results with seeming hyperbole like "the Black fuse can double the performance of a well tuned system"…well, a decent ear cleaning may do the same, and the reason is at least explainable.

Really no mystery here at all. As a modestly talented DIY guy I understand that fuses have always been a bottleneck in terms of sound quality. I learned several years ago to build amplifiers and preamplifiers without them. Use a high quality circuit breaker as your on/off switch and avoid fuses in the all important power supply. All that voltage/current going through a tiny, tiny wire connected with cheap fuse holder clamps does degrade the power supply. Seems straight forward in this particular fuse position.

I suppose these aftermarket fuses just limit the power supply less than the common fuse. That makes sense also.

Do one better and bypass those cheap fuse connectors and solder both ends. This makes it harder to swap fuses and direction, but it will certainly help the sound quality. 

In digital gear, I just bypass the fuse altogether with great results as fuses are in fact a bottleneck point in terms of sound quality. Many simply could not live with such a mod and I completely understand. The point is the sound quality of these pieces improves with the fuse bypassed as fuses degrade sound. 

I do not view fuses as a place where the voodoo claim can possibly reside, at least for the most part. Any fuse manufacturer using technology to improve the passing of voltage, current, and signal through this sound degrading devise is doing good to the component and music that flows out of it. This is no different than upgrading any other component such as a capacitor, resister, rectifier, rca jack, binding post, wire and on and on. 

No, this is not at all hard to understand. At least to this simple aphile. Goodness, I upgraded the wire and rca jacks in a passive preamp and  improved the sound. I think an upgraded fuse would also be a reasonable place to look for upgrades in performance.

" You are such a cynic."

Hmm, am I?

Well, in that case let's just all buy one of Geoff's hot rodded portable cd players and call it a day.    Won't run you much more than  black fuse.    :^) 

http://www.machinadynamica.com/index.html