We Need A Separate Forum for Fuses
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kosst, Can I be so bold as to offer some advice? Don't do that. Also, if you're in Chicago, or near enough, thecableco.com is located there. Fuses, power cords, speaker cables, etc. are all there for you to try. All the best, Nonoise |
When it comes to power supplies, I’ve not spoken with a designer who actually ever put a significant thought into the fuse beyond its inclusion because of the obvious necessities. I have talked with some who mentioned the superiority of circuit breakers. My position on that remains, given the ridiculous pricing of so many of these products, the inclusion of a fuse instead of a circuit breaker seems wrong. Further, when it comes to tube amplifiers, you don’t really see much divergence in design. Like the rest of the amplifier, most of the implementation consists of simply lifting from the products that have come along since the 1930s, whether guitar or hifi. Bring up the schematic of any 1950s Fender guitar amplifier, and the power supply and the rest of it will look far closer to the typical current names in this hobby than you might think. Apart from the decision on tube versus solid state rectification, and perhaps the inclusion of a choke, the differences lie in size and cost of the capacitance, other than the work (I encourage folks to read the GreenForce patent) of my friend Bob Backert, you don’t see much change in power supply thought from the old days. I’ve never actually replaced any of my fuses with anything other than the LittleFuse, Bussman, Radio Shack, etc. I’m happy enough where I sit, and don’t feel any burning desire for these fuses, or the need for overall system improvement to drive me down such paths. But at the end of the day, as a material scientist engineer / chemist producing electronic materials, I feel interested from a distance. My thought process follows whether the ** potential ** for these after-market fuses could increase the performance of an audio component. Based on my experience, the answer is, YES. Improved materials COULD result in an improvement in either objective or subjective criteria. Everyone knows, sometimes we can measure differences, but they do not translate to anything sonically beneficial. Other times, we cannot measure differences, yet we can hear them. Cost, and beyond that, actual value constitute different criteria that me and my colleagues considered only after we established the effectiveness or lack thereof of the material considered. Efficacy and cost represented two different components in our initial research and analysis, though they obviously often become critical and interdependent components at some juncture. Now, as I’ve previously stated, I know of no high-end audio company that could perform the sort of testing to generate the hard numbers on why these fuses would grade out as superior. Or not. To that statement, how many folks claim they measured the resistance of each on their multimeters, and saw absolutely no difference? Sorry, but measuring this level of resistivity requires a lot more than your $13 or $13K meter, including things like the ability to create an ohmic contact. I’m confident specific groups within companies like Philips, Matsushita, Samsung, and Sony do possess the capabilities, and COULD perform such analysis. But so far, to my knowledge, none has shown any interest in doing so. @geoffkait routinely mentions NASA when it comes to fuses - my position is, if you have or know of tangible evidence on the sort of comparisons I’ve described, please point us to it. Until and unless I see that, we’re left only testing (actually, I do have a few ideas for testing we could try, such as A / B the voltage / current readings through the power supply) via listening, which I certainly don’t dismiss. But that’s clearly where so much of the disconnect between the two sides lies. In the end, I don’t begrudge anyone their tastes of happiness, tell folks how / where to spend their money, or what constitutes value for them. Many folks here have established enough trust on this site that if they claim to hear a meaningful enough difference to justify the cost of these fuses, I support their position, and certainly, their right to claim it. Again, maybe not enough to go try / buy a fuse, but enough to smile about the happiness they’ve found |
