NEW PROTOTYPE FUSES COMING >>>

Rubber Soul has long been my favorite of theirs, but Revolver is mighty fine too. Their sound changed quite a bit between those two albums; George and John switched from Gretsch and Rickenbacker guitars to matching Epiphone Casinos, Paul from a Hofner bass to a Rickenbacker, and all of them from Vox amps to Fender. Ringo's drum sound changed a lot too, from small and muffled to big and boomy. I also heard Abbey Road made the switch from tube electronics to solid state between the two albums, but that may just be myth.

Well, okay @wolf_garcia, only the sitar ;-). Harrison said he didn’t touch a guitar for a coupla years, and you can hear it. His playing on "Rain" and "Paperback Writer" (both fabulous songs) was great (and on a lot of Revolver, their last excellent album imo), next thing we knew he was writing and playing "Within You Without You", a real nothing of a song. Plus, he was no master of that Indian instrument, just a barely passable dabbler, if that.

Acid (I’ll assume) lead Lennon to think Yoko was an artist, and we got "Number 9". I rest my case! To be clear, I love "Strawberry Fields Forever" (acid drenched though it is), and about half the white album. Sgt. Pepper has a LOT of filler, a vastly over-rated album imo. The Let It Be album is dreadful, unlistenable. By the time of Abbey Road they were in my rear view mirror, left in the dust by The Band, Dylan, Van Morrison, Randy Rewman, Ry Cooder, Jackson Browne, etc. etc. They had over-stayed their welcome with me, and were passed their sell-by date.

JW Blue, Jim? Now yer talkin’! I bypassed the fuse (in fact the entire fuse block, as well as the horrid speaker connectors, installing Cardas binding posts in their place) in my Magneplanar Tympani T-IVa.

Roger’s views on audiophile parts is often over-simplified. He DID consider electrolytic caps unsuitable for some applications, fine for others. It’s all in his AudioCircle writings. And he was making speaker cables at the end, and not just to make money.

It was the use use of fuses that were not of "high breaking capacity" design that he warned against in his amps, and in fact as part of any amp to which such a fuse was connected to output tubes. He received back at his shop an RM-9 that was destroyed by a full compliment of Hi-Fi Tuning fuses which did not preform their primary task: protecting the circuitry they were connected to. 12 non-performing fuses which cost as much as the amp itself? Ridiculous!

I have long stayed out away from this discussion, having myself done no comparing of fuses. But the Johnny Walker Black (the favorite blended Scotch of both myself and Chrisopher Hitchens) has kicked in, and I’m thinking what the Hell.

I suppose it’s possible that the electrical characteristics of any given fuse could be great enough to effect the electricity reaching the power transformer of, say, a power amp. Roger Modjeski measured a variety of fuses, and posted his findings in his Music Reference section in the AudioCircle Forum. He DID measure differences, but at levels far below, he claimed, the threshold of audibility. And he had real good ears, and listened through ESL loudspeakers, both QUAD and those of his own design and manufacture. His own great electronics as well, obviously. He was also a musician, and "advanced" music lover.

But a fuse impacting the sound characteristics of the amp? Transparency, frequency extension, tonal balance, instrumental and vocal timbre, depth/soundstage/imaging, etc. etc. etc.? I’m very skeptical that is even possible. A fuse doesn’t "see" those kinds of information, only electricity. That the electricity passing through a fuse could be effected in ways that create effects in the ways mentioned above seems most unlikely to me.

But then I believe in science, not mysticism (George Harrison discovering the sitar and The Beatles taking LSD ruined the Beatles). Western vs. Eastern? Somewhat related, I like what Dylan (Bob, not Thomas) said: "It’s not left or right, it’s up or down".