Last weekend, a guy who had a pair of Frieds came to my house for help getting them to work. One of his loudspeakers had the fuse holder break, and he found himself stuck.
Most loudspeakers Bud produced came with "tweeter protection", consisting of either a fuse or light bulb, as in his own words, he hated doing warranty work at his cost. I’ve learned over the years the conventional wisdom of protecting tweeters via a fuse doesn’t work the way folks think. They still fry over time. Except in moments of huge power coming into the loudspeaker, the fuse proves worthless.
Anyway, I simply bypassed the fuse, and made the connection on the crossover to allow his speaker to come back to life. We tested them out by playing them, and even at his advanced age, he instantly noticed this speaker sounding very different (better!) than the other. I soon bypassed the fuse on the other speaker to balance them out. He couldn’t believe how much the fuse degraded the sound
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@chefhat, "thought your tweeter story was fascinating, but I would doubt whether
the expensive fuse would sound better than the regular fuse - however I
can see why no fuse would sound the best!"
Looks like we agree no fuse would sound the best. Inherent in that position, I believe comes the understanding of how much sonic damage a fuse imparts. To that end, it seems easy enough to use the same patterns of better materials and / or metallurgies producing better sound as resistors, capacitors, switches, etc.
Regarding the measurements often brought up, as someone who worked as a materials science engineer / R&D chemist at a company providing the raw materials to the likes of Vishay, Dale, Mills, IRC, Raytheon, GE, Chrysler, GM / Ford, Bosch, TRW, Panasonic, Kyocera, Samsung, and on and on I believe the requirements for achieving an ohmic contact necessary for measuring the resistivity of these sort of low-range materials lies outside the capability of any high-end audio company I can think of. They simply lack the resources to do so: money, equipment, personnel, methodology, experience, understanding, and an overall benchmarking / measuring stick itself. Beyond the vast array of all of the equipment we had bought or developed to provide the hard numbers, using my eyes with optical and electron microscopes became an invaluable part in helping me develop the sort of conductor, resistor, semiconductor, dielectric, glass, solder, and polymer materials we did. To that end, although I do not own these sorts of fuses, knowing the chasm that lies between the differences in the properties of the materials themselves and the ability of the sort of test equipment this industry employs to perceive and evaluate them along with my own experience as an audiophile, when folks claim to hear sonic differences, I believe them
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@georgehifi You make a good point regarding the aging of fuses. I don't think we have considered the degradation they endure by the turn on - turn off process over time. As someone who has had to run a lot of aging tests in the electronic materials we developed and produced, ran them against our competition, and saw the ill effects, I should have put 2 and 2 together.
Regardless of whether you believe in the efficacy of using better materials in fuses, fuse direction, or just use the typical off the shelf fuse, it's probably a good idea to think of fuses more like our engine oil, and regularly change them.
Hope we can come to the point where we're not so dug in on either side so as to lose sight of the worth of each person, let alone hear what they have to say.
@douglas_schroeder Just wanted to tip my hat to you for the way you've conducted yourself in this thread. Great job!
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@geoffkait "The fusible element is comprised of thick film gold that is deposited on
a thermally and electrically insulated substrate. A complete range of
fusing values is achievable by precisely controlling the fusible element
print thickness and geometry. Thick film silver termination pads are
placed at each end of the thick film fusible element. The fusible
element is completely covered with an arc suppressive glass."
That's exactly the material I used to R&D and produce. Beyond the full spectrum of thick film, we also made thin (metallorganic and organometallic) film, gold powders, glass (sounds like a single item, but we had too many formulations to list or discuss here), dielectric tapes, solder, etc. Most fun at work I ever had, and a fair number of us were audiophiles.
Whose thick film did you use, and what means did you use to apply them? Your substrate was alumina or something else?
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@geoffkait Thank you for clarifying
By the way, as you just celebrated the 50th anniversary of your presentation, you are WAAAYYYY older than I realized...
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@geoffkait Let’s hope the military isn’t paying for fancy fuses what they paid for toilet seats on Air Force One.
If anyone has ever worked on either side of the military procurement process, they know how much they (we) overpay for everything.
As I mentioned, I used to produce electronic raw material formulations. My boss once explained to me how to price a new material I developed. The same material would become multiple products, all aimed at different markets. China price was 100x less. Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia cost 10x less. North America industry carried the baseline pricing. Europe, Israel, and Australia cost 10x more. US government, including FBI cost 100x more. US military was 1000x higher. This happened in the days following the news about the hammers, toilet seats, etc., and my boss was adamant and utterly unapologetic. I'm a bit surprised I didn't go over the line, and earn a free ride to jail that day |
@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
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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
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Thank you for the kindness @uberwaltz and @nonoise I feel we do ourselves a disservice by not providing specifics to statements we make ala NASA and fuses, and only giving part of the picture. Such information provides the discussion little credibility benefit. Likewise, I disagree fuse manufacturers provide ample information, evidence, and background in regard to their products. In fact, they've done the complete opposite. But obviously, from their sales, my (and anyone in the anti camp) assertions prove irrelevant. At any rate, for reasons I previously explained, that doesn't take away from me believing the potential for improvement their products provide exists. I'm not here to debate how much, if any, improvement they provide or whether that improvement represents value, as only the customer has the ability and right to determine that. Anyway, to practice what I preach, if anyone's interested, here's a link to Bob Backert's GreenForce power supply patent https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/15/91/21/3464dfe8a23d12/US20130279221A1.pdfAfter many, many years as tech at a high-end audio salon that went belly up, folks enthusiastically experienced Bob's work via his mods to their equipment. Enthusiastically enough so that Bob began producing his own, now highly regarded, preamplifiers featuring his unique power supply. I should also mention my friends Vytas and Marc from Veloce, who also took a different path in terms of power supplies, though no patent exists regarding their work, achieved results beyond the norm. Like many great things, they sort of stumbled into what they got unintentionally, and though the results were impressive (impossible and funny sort of story around it, but Harry Pearson of TAS declared the phono stage of their preamplifier the best he'd ever encountered), the understanding didn't arrive until much later. When I happened to guess what happened, they felt surprised, but a sort of light went on for me to make it seem so obvious and simple. Coincidentally, Bob, Vytas / Marc, and myself (and Robert Stein aka The Cable Company) all live in the Philadelphia area, are friends, began thinking about power supplies several years ago, arriving to the same sort of questions and concerns (though we never discussed it with one another until long after), and began working through them, though with very different solutions |
