Welcome to the fuse club.
The secret to a great amplifier...
Is a $150 Orange fuse from Synergistic Research. Seriously, extreme boost in sonic performance. Blacker background, larger soundstage... if I wanted to make some bucks, I’d put these is cheap OEM compnents and start letting the accolades and purchasers come calling.
Mind you, I have a high value-oriented $20k system, so it was nice before, but damn!
Mind you, I have a high value-oriented $20k system, so it was nice before, but damn!
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redwoodaudio:"
Excuse me? Something bugged you, and that's fine, but to be very clear, I think these fuses could be a shortcut to cheap euphonic amplification, they are that powerful to my ear." Hello redwoodaudio, Yes, your post sentence made no sense and inflicts mental dissonance in those that read it: " if I wanted to make some bucks, I’d put these is cheap OEM compnents and start letting the accolades and purchasers come calling." Tim |
@simao I wondered the same thing for a while, thinking it mostly a silly idea, but it turns our that everything in the electrical pathways of our components can have an effect on sound quality. Fuses are probably the cheapest off the shelf part of that pathway in most cases and appear to function as an electrical bottleneck. Better fuse, better electrical signal, better sound. I'm a believer now. |
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Feeling inconsolable, my amp doesn't take fuses, neither orange nor otherwise. Also not sure using fuse-suppository will have possible, favourable, surrogate effect? Maybe a question of using correct orifice? Any advise please? Oh, maybe sticking in a pipe and smoking it? So long it will not cause blowing my own fuse, please? M. 🇿🇦 |
Too bad. You're right, the Orange Fuse is incredible. As to why they don't just stick the fuse in there and blow the competition away (they would) the answer is simple. And unlike the haters this is an actual answer not made up BS. I called up and asked some of these guys. The answer is simple: cheap fuses are cheap, consistent, and low risk. Besides, think about it. If they do the fuse, what about the feet? Stock feet are horrible. Why do they ship the crappy rubber freebie power cord? Patch cords? Eventually people will figure out its the SR Orange Fuse. Then some guy gonna wonder why not the Beeswax? I want the Beeswax! Where does it end? Its just mental goofy the criticisms haters come up with. Mental crazy. Its not the thread that should be shut down. Its them. The haters. Shut them down. At least until they learn to move along. Please. |
redwoodaudio, since you have a high value approach and appreciate these kinds of improvements, there's a whole world of tweaks, all different kinds, yet producing very similar improvement. Similar in terms of improved detail, dynamic shadings (and sometimes macro dynamic power and slam), lower noise for blacker backgrounds. The Orange Fuse is high value because for $160 or whatever its about as much as a lot of $500 power cords. Incidentally, if one should ever blow give them a call, I don't know if its SR or the dealer but they seem to have a policy of replacing one if it blows. |
redwoodaudio, one more thing you might want to try. There are people on this site with nothing to contribute other than an endless drive to post over and over again more and more evidence that they have nothing to contribute. Some are downright mean, others just way less funny than they think they are. The one thing they all have in common is they produce a huge amount of bilge we all must wade through to find what's worth reading. What I have found seems to work pretty good, you find someone like that you make a list. So you don't forget. Because those of us with normal personalities, our natural instinct is to treat everyone as equals. So we need a list to remind ourselves. Then put them on permanent ignore. Do not respond to a single thing they post. They don't exist. If you can think of a better answer I'm all ears. Saves a tremendous amount of time and frustration because the instant you see the name you know to not read any further. What's the point? They didn't write it for you anyway. They wrote it for themselves. So let them be to themselves. Eventually maybe they will learn to just move along. Don't hold your breath. Don't waste it on them either. For an attenion seeker nothing worse than not getting any. Permanent ignore. That's the ticket. |
@millercarbon - thanks for the support on this thread. I've been finding your posts very informative, particularly on the more esoteric audiophile pursuits (tweaks, electrical, etc.). I appreciate that you typically come across as a decent person more interested in giving good-faith advice than the type of thread sabotage we're seeing here. Honestly, to those of you on this thread who are hostile to the basic premise of the thread, please give those of us who are sharing our ideas and experiences the benefit of the doubt. I am definitely not posting here to engender conflict with anyone. |
Dear Mr. Wood, when I see orange my attention peak because my wife live to dress in orange, specially this time of year. I love blacker background, and do cords have more attack and decay with orange fuss? I must work so I don’t post on these forum all day, and have free time like some of these guys, but are there different color that give more 3 dimension? finally where do I get deal on this type of fuse? Thank you for posting these ideas. |
From an old thread: https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/why-don-t-amplifier-companies-use-high-end-fuses aolmrd1241886 posts09-04-2017 4:49pm"So, the question I have is....if fuses were so important, than why don’t Amplifier companies all install them as OEM equipment?" I can only speak for Merrill Audio...but, my Veritas mono block amps shipped with Synergistic fuses already installed... some manufacturers are quite aware of sound quality differences with premium parts. Others...not so much. |
Same old thread: nonoise6,405 posts09-07-2017 11:42amA fuse is not a wire. A fuse is used in place of a wire, or interrupts a trace, on a circuit board. We can all agree that a wire or trace should be of very high quality/purity to sound it's best. A fuse is an over current device engineered to melt, thus breaking the circuit. It's not made to "sound" good. The end caps are usually made of zinc, tin, and aluminum or alloys of them. The internal wire is usually made of nichrome (nickel, chromium, iron, etc.). It's sacrificial in nature and design, much like MOVs in a surge protector. Why would any "engineer" see it any other way? Enter modern high fidelity. Would anyone here, in their right mind, use any of the aforementioned metals in their speaker cables? Their interconnects? Their power cables? Their RCA jacks? Their speaker terminals? I think not. The fuse is a choke point. Nothing happens unless it gets past the fuse. As someone else has pointed out on another thread, about 85% of what goes on in an amp has a "leg" in what comes after the fuse. Not all fuses deal with the incoming AC. Some, like the ones in my SACD are in the signal path. There's no way in hell I'm not experimenting with a better made fuse. One that uses rhodium plated copper, copper and nothing else, such as the PADIS fuses. $25 apiece. Better pass through, though not as good as no fuse but not as flat out horrible as some of the cheaper fuses out there. Some here have said that they just swap them out on a regular basis and show pictures of tortured, aged fuses. A simple look at Wiki says that there should be no damage from minor, harmless surges of current or oxidize or change behavior even after years of service and yet we have proof that the cheaply made ones do just that. I think what we're witnessing here is a very conservative backlash against progress. The founding tenet of conservatism is stop, not so fast. Well, that was many years ago since the advent of aftermarket fuses and it took a while for me to catch on to the "trend" but now, after observing it firsthand, I don't see what all the hubbub is about. Hearing is believing and it's so very easy to hear. As for any argument about "it's just a 1/4" piece of wire. C'mon now. No matter how small and insignificant you think it is, it just messed with the current or signal, and now it's going from one amplification device to another until it gets to the outputs. I'd rather have as pure an original current flow or signal as possible, instead of a corrupted one. All the best, Nonoise |
another gem from prior thread: auxinput2,235 posts09-09-2017 11:54am Wow, this thread went to a black hole in a hurry! Several things we need to be aware of: - If you have looked inside a fuse (like the glass fuses), you will see a VERY thin wire. Say a 1 amp fuse. The internal wire is extremely small, something like 26awg or 28awg (not entirely sure). If this is for a preamp, would you ever put on a power cable smaller than 18awg? (that’s stock, and I don’t think they make them smaller). No, you would upgrade to something like 14awg or even 12awg -- so that there is less current restriction. All A/C has to go through this tiny wire, even if it’s less than 1" long. - The wire in the fuse has electrical resonance as well. Different upgraded fuses will sometimes do things to combat this resonance. The same thing happens inside electrolytic capacitors (during charge/discharge). The material/filler used in capacitors has a definite affect on electrical resonance and sound quality. Poor resistance to electrical resonance in caps will result is harsh sound that lacks solidness. - People who say that the fuse and power cords are not in the signal path are not entirely correct. The actual waveform signal that starts at the source is never the actual signal that makes it to the amp. For anyone who doesn’t realize this, the basic idea of a transistor or op amp circuit is to "regenerate" the incoming signal. It never truly "passes through". There is always a resistor that the signal passes through and then a opamp/transistor gain circuit. Well, the gain circuit uses voltage/current from the A/C power supply to re-create or "add to" the output voltage for the signal. The power cord and fuse has a definite impact to the quality of this power supply voltage/current. - Since A/C power is used to create/add-to this signal, the type of power cord or fuse will definitely affect the "flavor" of the sound. Just like comparing gold-plated connector to rhodium plated. Comparing silver wire to copper wire, etc. - There are things that our ears are hearing which we cannot measure for at our current level of technology. Granted, electrical engineers will "nay say" this, but ask yourself this: What can we measure today that we couldn’t measure 10 years ago? 20 years? 35 years? (when they were making tube based electronics). |
Granted electrical engineers would not "nay say" this in the same way they don’t nay say when someone claims that unicorns and fairies exist. They just look at them, sort of shake their head and move on. To those that ask, though, they may be willing to describe the actual circuitry in a power supply and why that little fuse has far less impact than you think it does. |
Unicorns and fairies.....what a pertinent analogy, and typical of a naysayer. These same engineers say that the fuse cannot impact the sound but that correct orientation of the fuse in the holder can affect the sound. Well, which is it? If all it is is a sacrificial device and it's placement in the design of the amp doesn't matter, why does the fuse holder not having that exact grip on the fuse matter? How can a speck or mote of anything on the fuse end cap make a difference if for the same reasons a fuse can't? I would contend that a fuse made of highly conductive metals, on the order of what you'd find in a cable or trace, would have more effect than the god awful, non conductive metals used in a bog standard fuse, and that that would account for a greater difference in what possibly couldn't affect the sound whereas that speck or mote of dust would. Why does using a solid bar of copper result in better sound? Don't do it, but many have tried it and reported back about it for decades. Why do amp designers go to all the trouble of designing a great sounding amp, only to have to add the fuse element afterwards, as an after thought, and find the amp to not sound as good as before? With all those E.E. degrees comes a lot of conventional wisdom about the role of the fuse, but not the possibility of it's contribution to the sound, since it's role is that of a sacrificial one. To do so in such a blithely ignorant manner without trying it for oneself, to see if a difference can be heard, is an insult to the first and greatest scientific method: direct observation. All the best, Nonoise |
Right. The signal path is not what we think it is. If it was then power conditioners, and even power supplies, would not matter. Heck even speaker cabinets would be irrelevant. Hard to get more outside the signal path than a speaker cabinet. Then again, maybe not. The room is even further outside the signal path. Yet there are people who say the room is the most important component. One thing we can say for sure, anyone who says a fuse can’t matter because its outside the signal path, or whatever, when all these other things do, well they have at the very least not given the subject much thought. |
@tubebuffer - Let's plug those $160 fuses into some stock Chinese OEM DACs, put a fancy audio brand name on it, market it as the marvelous new "giant-killer" to Thomas & Stereo on YouTube and make some serious $$$. I've got a decent job as it is right now, but were I more of an entrepeneur and slightly less ethical, i'd be all over it. |
From what I can tell, most engineers would call it confirmation bias, but a they would allow on the off chance that the changing the fuse did anything, that it was a factor of cleaning contacts or reseating the fuse and that is all I have ever seen attributed. Let's say I have two fuses. One is lower resistance, one is higher resistance. Which of those fuses will result in more high frequency noise and ripple in the power supply? |
One needn't spend $160 on a fuse to get better results. Why is it that naysayers always base their premises on esoteric prices when a fuse at 1/3 the cost will have an effect? You can spend even less and still hear a difference. Also, why is it that there's always a flock, group, gaggle or pod of newcomers that stirs this subject up and thinks themselves to be oh, so, relevant and witty, as if this decades old subject weren't already debated and laid to rest? All the best, Nonoise |
I'm really not trying to convince or persuade anyone. Just letting those of you who are interested know, in slightly cheeky way, of my experience with these fuses. I'm not special. But I needed to hear this from others a few times before I could take the leap. And I'm glad I did. I don't care if you do or don't want to try it. But if you do, it's fun. |