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Direction of aftermarket fuses (only for believers!)

It is with reluctance that I start another thread on this topic with the ONLY GOAL for believers to share their experience about aftermarket fuses.
To others: you can call us snobs, emperors w/o clothes,... etc but I hope you refrain posting just your opinion here. If you did not hear any difference, great, maybe there isn’t.

The main driver for this new post is that I am starting a project to mod my NAD M25 7 ch amp for my home theater. It has 19 fuses (2 per channel, 4 on the power supply board, 1 main AC) and I will try a mix of AMR Gold, SR Black and Audio Magic Platinum (anyway that is the plan, I may try out some other brands/models). As it is reasonably difficult to change them, esp the ones on each channel module that requires complete disassembly, I would like to know what the direction is for these models mentioned and of course, others who HAVE HEARD there is a difference please share your experience on any fuse model you have tried.

Fuses are IME directional:
Isoclean is one of the first to indicate the direction (2008/2009) on their fuses. Users of HiFi Tuning (when the awareness rose quite a bit amongst audiophiles) have mostly heard the difference.

As an IEEE engineer, I was highly skeptical of cabling decades ago (I like the speaker design of John Dunlavy but he said on many occasions that cables nor footers matter at all, WRONG!). Luckily, my curiosity proved me wrong as well. I see the same skepticism that I and many others had about the need for aftermarket cables many, many years ago now on fuses and esp on the direction on fuses.

Another example is the direction of capacitors (I do not mean electrolytic types). Even some manufacturers now and certainly many in the past did not believe it can make a difference sonically. Maybe some do but it takes time in the assembly to sort and put them in the right direction/order (esp as some of the cap manufacturers still do not indicate "polarity") so that maybe is one argument why this is not universally implemented.








jazzonthehudson
Post removed 
geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 
Jea48, you would undoubtedly save yourself a lot of angst and confusion by doing some due diligence prior to getting involved in the whole fuse directionality thing. I’m afraid I can’t help you a a there appears to be nothing I can say that you will accept. I think I’ve made myself clear. Good luck with all that.

cheers

Geoff Kait
mapman's avatar
mapman
22,902 posts
 

jea,

You will undoubtedly save a lot of angst and confusion by expecting nothing from some people because that is exactly what you are likely to get.

Post removed 
atmasphere's avatar
atmasphere
12,138 posts
 
What exactly are you insinuating?

That your technique is to continuously troll until you’ve beaten people down. Its not a way to further discussion, merely a method of making yourself always right all the time.

You can test the fuse holder separately if you really were interested in arriving at the truth. I realize you and Al are just playing Ivory Tower, and have no interest or plan to test either the fuse or the fuse holder. That’s the difference between a Skeptic and a Sceptic.
This statement is false and is an example of the trolling behavior and rhetoric to which I referred.

I did point out on a different thread that we found issues with fuses a long time ago, and in 1990, designed our MA-2 with an entirely different kind of fuse and fuse holder on the basis of improved performance.

Apparently Geoff has forgotten the fact that I joined this thread recently with some results on testing. Those results are that the directionality appears out of coincidence and that actually greater improvement can be had by rotating the fuse in the holder for best contact. The improvement is measurable and audible; descriptions others have made on this thread of what happens when you get the direction right accurately describe what happens when the contact area is maximized.

Occam’s Razor has something to say here! Given that a fuse has to be used in AC circuits and given that people report differences by reversing the fuse, and also understanding how fuses are inherently incapable of having directionality in any way whatsoever, the explanation that they somehow have an effect by reversing them in the holder is a fairly complex explanation: some sort of unknowable, unmeasurable quality of the fuse itself.

A simpler explanation is that the reversal is improving the contact area because fuse and holder are not dimensionally perfect and the fuse might sit better in the holder in one direction. By rotating the fuse in the holder without reversing it gets the same effect only more profoundly.

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