Fuses

Quick question, what is your guy’s experience with bypassing caps?
Does it add anything to sound? or just smear it, and cause coherency issues?

By-passing powersupply or voltage rail caps is a good idea, but it’s not a good idea to bypass caps that are in the signal path as they will have different time constants, and smear at frequencies where they are both doing work.
Alway use the best quality "single cap" in the signal path.

Cheers George

Oregonpapa's forum is closed so I am contributing here.   In my system, the SR blue fuses and outlets sound warm and inviting.  I tried an SR orange fuse and found it to be more open, possibly more dynamic but stuck with the blue.   The black fuse and outlet have a grainy sound, less dynamic, clear and warm compared to the blue.   So, skipping the orange, the purple is touted as superior (in all ways?) to the orange.  That would be a great accomplishment at $199.  

The other complaint concerning the black fuse is that it took literally 72 hours prior to sounding listenable/good.   The blue fuses sounded superior from the time I stuck it in compared to 1000+ hours on black fuses.  I hope that the purple fuses sound better as soon as they are installed and not suffer through 50 to 100 hours prior to sounding great.  I just don't have the patience and don't like wasting tubes.

Thank you. @georgehifi
You just saved me some money, much appreciated.

Also  I am making some fuses with Gold Plated OCC Copper wire from Neotech (3x).1mm strands, and some OCC Copper fuses .2mm strand. Each coming out to about 7.5-8 amps.
Quick question, again if anyone knows, are there any commercial fuses that have this wire construction? Gold plated copper wire.

Hi Fi Tuning Supreme fuses apparently use a silver, copper, gold mix solder, but a solid copper melt wire.  They have gold end caps, ceramic body, and are cryogenically treated.  I have not heard of any fuses that use the gold-plated Neotech wire you asked about (or the silver-gold Mundorf wire) as melt wire inside of the fuse...unless SR is using something special.  I cannot find a description of the melt wire used in the SR fuses, although they list all the other pieces and parts....i.e., Orange:

Ceramic Body, Silica Filled, Brass Nickel Plated Contacts,1,000,000 volt multi-stage, high-frequency conditioning process, 2nd Stage Rev. 2.0 Molecular realignment process, Directional UEF Compound first developed for Galileo SX PowerCellGraphene

I have considered filling a conventional fuse with beeswax (just for fun and curiosity) by drilling a small hole and using a syringe to inject warm beeswax, but have not considered making fuses with filament wire of my choice.  I am curious how you achieve the correct break values when using your own wire, do you test them?

After trying a variety of HiFi Tuning and SR fuses, and not hearing anything that makes me want to spend the money, my go-to has been to use mostly ceramic-body fuses with, Teflon tape wrapped around the body for damping, contact treatment on the ends, and small orthodontic rubber bands to provide tension on board-mounted fuse holders.  For $20, I will consider ordering the ACME fuses to replace older fuses, as I have used their silver-plated outlets.