We Need A Separate Forum for Fuses

Kosst, I will explain that your description of aftermarket fuses is misapplied, as your other descriptions of the effects of aftermarket fuses wherein you discount them. You conclude that they can do nothing exceptional, so obviously you think aftermarket fuses are superfluous. 

Well, you're wrong. Aftermarket fuses are not sucker bait, but a purposeful change to effectively alter the sound. A fine HiFi component should readily reveal any such changes. Any component which would mask such things is junk. If you made an amp that was insensitive to aftermarket fuses I would consider it a horrid design. 

Ouch, and, touche.

To further support douglas schoeder's point, I have experienced scenarios where the quality of components directly affects the ability to "hear" the real signal.  This was very apparent when I was comparing two different DACs.  Using somewhat lower quality interconnect cables, we could not really hear any differences between the two DACs.  However, when we upgraded to highly superior cables (i.e. solid-core OCC silver), it was made very apparent that there were significant differences in sound quality between the two DACs.

@douglas_schroeder "A fine HiFi component should readily reveal any such changes."

That's an excellent point.  I've found that better tube amplifiers possess more ability to reflect the tubes used in them than lesser tube amplifiers

One of the goals of a good designer will be to minimize the sensitivity of the performance of his or her design to extraneous factors, such as the vagaries of incoming power, expectable differences in the characteristics of other system components that may be used in conjunction with the design, and, yes, fuses. However, based on a very substantial body of empirical and anecdotal evidence it seems clear that as a practical matter that goal generally falls well short of being fully realized.

On the other hand, though, IMO it is also true that the correlation between sensitivity to extraneous hardware-related factors and the sonic quality and musical resolution of a design also falls well short of being perfect. To cite just one obvious example to illustrate that point, among countless other examples that could be cited:

Everything else being equal, a speaker having low impedance, and/or an impedance which varies widely over the frequency range, will be more resolving of differences between amplifiers and speaker cables than a speaker having high impedance and/or an impedance which doesn’t vary greatly over the frequency range. Would one conclude from that fact that the high impedance speaker is necessarily inferior in terms of sonic quality and resolution of musical detail? Or going even further that the high impedance speaker is "junk" and "horrid design"?

So just as maximizing the sonic quality and musical resolution of a design may have a tendency to work in the direction of increasing sensitivity to extraneous hardware-related factors, intelligent circuit design may have a tendency to work in the opposite direction. And generally speaking, IMO, the net result of those competing tendencies will be a correlation between sonic quality and resolution of musical detail on the one hand, and resolution of hardware differences on the other hand, that while being significantly greater than zero is also significantly less than perfect. So I would have to respectfully but emphatically disagree with Doug’s blanket characterization of insensitivity to fuse differences as signifying "junk" and "horrid design." And I believe that most experienced electronics designers would agree with me.

Regards,
-- Al