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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
davidpritchard's avatar
davidpritchard
866 posts
 

auxinput:

What a wonderful summary of your fuse experiments and the sonic results. I absolutely agree that these fuses have a major effect on the sound of a system and one's enjoyment of the music.

Because these fuses do change the sound, finding the optimal fuse for a single component can become time consuming.

If one does not want to do a lot of experimentation , I am suggesting auditioning the Synergistic Research Black fuse. I think it has some of the best sonic qualities available and as importantly comes with a 30 day trial or refund. They have improved both the digital and analog components in my systems.

David Pritchard

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mapman's avatar
mapman
22,970 posts
 
HE said unless you know what your doing so I would not interpret that as a slight to those who do.
peter_s
1,349 posts
 
 I just got the following message from Andy at synergistic research:
The current should flow from left to right as you read the fuse label (From “S” to “R”).
marqmike
856 posts
 
peter-s that is what I did in the beginning and it sounded great. And noticeably or a lot better than my littlefuse’s in the three places I put the SR fuses. Good enough for me to not worry if that is the right direction. And I did put one in at a time. If one sounded worse I would have turned them around and if it didn’t get better then I would have returned them. But as well as they improved the sound I couldn’t help thinking after, that was some of the best 360.00 I spent on my system.
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