Fuses

fiesta75-

MC makes some simple mistakes like series and parallel resistors... 

Ah yes the ellipsis, three dots that usually indicates the intentional omission of a word, sentence, or whole section of a text being quoted. Care to run that through your MDS decoder ring and translate into a full English sentence, please?

georgehifi-

Sorry George,
I can’t take anything you say seriously. You have blown all your credibility

George posted this. So even he gets it. Please go away now. Please.

Seriously. Please. Go away.

I haven't directly compared to be able to say for sure. Tinned copper are what I used based on HHF reviews. Don't quote me, it seems unlikely, but 1uf might not have worked because "maybe" that is enough to shift response. It seems like an insignificant amount. But I was careful to keep all my values exactly the same as stock so as to avoid any risk of that. It could be .01uf works because it is enough to help detail without affecting crossover points at all. Just a hunch.

That'll work great. The way I think of it, the reason the better caps are better is they are exceptionally smooth and consistent in the way they charge and discharge. This allows them to pass a signal that is both detailed and extremely liquid smooth at the same time. Where lesser caps sort of spark in quantum steps instead of a smooth curve. Large caps of high quality that can do this are very expensive. But they can deliver this smooth fast response across all kinds of dynamic demands. The little filter or bypass cap like you are talking can't do much for the larger swings. But most of what we hear in fine detail is very micro-dynamic swings that the little cap can handle. So in effect the bypass cap gives you the detail you need to make the fine stuff sound a lot better and as long as the big cap "below" is pretty good quality you wind up with a lot of the Deulund big cap sound for a lot less money.

I used this in my crossovers using Deulund CuTn to bypass Jantzen Alumen Z, which are quite good caps but not Deulund level, but with the Deulund bypass they get darn close for a lot less money.

I don't have time or money to painstakingly burn in and compare all these different caps so I go by the info on sites like the home made hifi cap comparison. Worked great for me so that is what I recommend, unless you have someone better to go by.

Okay sorry, we were posting at the same time. You are right. The one who says many of us don't understand, he is in fact the one who doesn't understand. Anything, I am tempted to say. But won't.

femoore12-

I thought a fuse was a sacrificial safety device that melts during an overcurrent condition to protect an electrical circuit. So isn’t the role of a fuse to melt if there is too much current in order to protect an electrical circuit/device?

Correct. And you must have missed my earlier post explaining this. Ordinary fuses are designed to one spec, the current rating at which they melt and blow. They are not designed to perform perfectly linear or in any way at all really, at anything less than this. They are made to blow and nothing else.   

All wires, the more current the hotter they get. The hotter they get the more resistance increases. This is in effect a volume control, one where every dynamic peak increases current draw, which increases resistance, which turns down the volume. Ordinary fuses are in effect turning down the volume on transient peaks all the time. When you hear people saying the audiophile fuse sounds cleaner clearer more extended and dynamic this is all very easy to understand once you know about wires and resistance.   

Because unlike cheap fuses designed only to blow audiophile fuses are designed to perform with high sound quality all the way up to blowing.  

Pretty easy to understand, right?

For sure it is belief, and not knowledge, because water pressure definitely does affect how much water comes out the tap. Total logic fail. As usual.

lemonhaze-

@MC, when you selected the Path resistors had you made any comparisons with the likes of Duelund or Mundorf? I have tried some different ones and settled on Powertron by Vishay. Rated at 3W or 30W when mounted on a small heatsink. Clean, detailed and very dynamic but have not compared them to the 3 mentioned above. It seems even experienced DIYers seldom bother with resistors which I find surprising. 

I looked at those but no direct comparison experience. My crossover components were selected the same as all my other components: search around and sift through reviews and user comments for the best values.    

I learned from experience a very long time ago the difference these things make. So I was kind of surprised when some people told me resistors and inductors aren't so important. For some reason virtually all audiophiles fixate on caps. Kind of like they fixate on tubes. So it was pretty easy for me to disregard anyone like that and give just as much attention to resistors and inductors as caps. 

While I went off reviews and didn't compare myself, just the other day a local audiobud Brandon doing a similar XO upgrade on his Tekton Pendragon XL did. He heard a huge difference between the standard coil inductor and foil. Just like I thought there would be based on reading.   

So yeah it is kind of surprising experienced audiophiles don't see the value. Then again considering the way some of them think about fuses maybe not so surprising after all. Oh well. This is how we get to have systems they can only dream of.

When upgrading my crossovers earlier this year it involved a long deep dive into what each part (cap, resistor, inductor) does and how each one affects the sound. Every single one of the parts in there now is the exact same part, as measured the standard way using a meter to measure inductance, resistance, capacitance. Has to be. Otherwise it would screw with the frequency response and mess up the sound of the speakers. The goal is to make it better, not different. Better.

One of the things I had learned a long time ago with another crossover is resistor quality matters. Bad low quality resistor, smeared low quality sound. One way this happens, resistors heat up. When this happens resistance increases. This is just a fact, you could look it up. Hotter the wire, more the resistance.

Why do we use a resistor in a crossover in the first place? Why not just caps and inductors? Because the different drivers have different sensitivity, we use the resistor to match levels. Resistors are how we turn the volume down. Literally. A resistor is an attenuator. There are even volume controls made with a whole bunch of resistors of different values, called stepped attenuators. Each click is a little more or less resistance, a little more or less volume.

So in a speaker it is real important that we use resistors that can handle a lot of power without heating up. Heat is the enemy. To the extent a resistor gets hot it increases resistance, which turns down the volume, and this can happen very fast. Dynamics are fast. Thus a cheap resistor can rob your music of dynamics.

So I selected the very best Path Audio resistors I could find. The result is an already very lively and dynamic speaker became even more impressively dynamic! Details are largely dynamic swings. Also got a nice improvement in detail.

Now to the fuse. Just a thin piece of wire, it is supposed to burn out at a certain point, before too much current passes, in order to prevent the wires inside burning out.  

Burn out? Yeah. The fuse filament gets real hot, so hot it burns out.

Shocking! Yeah, no seriously, that’s what it does. Tiny thin little wire, gets real hot, so hot it melts.

Ordinary fuses are designed only to fail, no effort whatsoever goes into trying to get the most linear response possible at all points up to failure. Reasonable then to expect ordinary fuses to get hot a lot, and change resistance a lot, even well before failure. This robs the music of detail and dynamics. Just like the cheap resistors in my crossover.

What are the improvements people hear with better fuses? Great improvement in dynamics and detail. Precisely the same improvements our scientific analysis has led us to expect.

Real scientific analysis, the kind that breaks physical phenomena down into discrete understandable parts, analyzes the function of each part, and then proceeds logically to examine the consequences.

If you actually tried it you wouldn't say "may", you would know. Since you clearly do not know, why do you use all caps as if some kind of unimpeachable authority? Shouldn't you say instead, "I have no clue whatsoever just an incredibly strong yet uninformed opinion"? 

Or if not then please tell me I am wrong, and let us all know which fuses you have compared? What is your "NOT" based on? Anything? Anything AT ALL?

An anology:  despite an apparent lack of rigorous listening tests, we all know that there is a meaningful difference in SQ between tube and solid state amplification.  (I know the differences in harmonic distortion can be measured.)

Enjoy your degree!

I’m one of the few contributors to this thread thinking scientifically.

This "scientifically" trope is so tiresome. I blame our system of so-called education. It would seem to have gone nowhere but downhill since I was in it. I can still clearly recall this being covered perfectly clearly in school.

The easiest way to explain it is to think of two related but different sets of phenomena. One psychological/behavioral, the other material/physical. For some reason certain people here are fixated on and obsess with the material/physical even though the subject - audio - is clearly behavioral/psychological. A categorical error they never do recover from.

For behavioral/psychological science we have a number of different means of observation. We can try and observe everything all the time, we can observe everything at intervals, etc. If we choose to observe only certain things at certain times there is nothing more or less scientific about it, for the simple fact science is not a set of procedures. Science is not, "You must measure this, and you must measure that." Science is a method.

Would be so nice if people would understand just this one point. Science is a method. There is nothing about a meter or oscilloscope that magically makes them scientific. There is nothing about listening evaluations that dooms them to being unscientific. There simply is no way of saying something is unscientific simply because someone says, "I heard it" instead of, "I measured it." It just don’t work that way.

This is why reviewers always tell you at least a little about how they do their comparison. It isn’t for flavor or style. It is for context. Also it is important to know the thing we are comparing is really the thing we are comparing. If five things are changed at once we can say what we heard but in no way can we say which one of the five accounts for what we heard. Too many variables. This would be unscientific. It would be illogical too, to say the least.

That is why for example my system page is posted, and that is definitely why I explained what I did in warming up and how my system changes as it warms up. This gives my observations credibility as everyone knows gosh millercarbon is aware his system changes so he knows to expect that and what he says about the fuse probably really is about the fuse, he is not being misled by warm-up. See?

A serious person who understands, or at least wants to understand, would be thinking along these lines. To call something "unscientific" while demonstrating a false notion of the word, well let’s just say it doesn’t exactly burnish the rep.

Under? They are stuck on the paper. I will have to pull and take a better look. Was not a lot of time the other night.

Slow work day so let me tease this one apart.

Just based on a preponderance of the testimonials the fuses may be exerting some effect.

So you’re saying they exert an effect directly on the mind then. Interesting.

But, Millercarbon, your “test” as you describe it, is biased, and its reliability does not rise above the testimonial.

All tests are biased. Say you decide to test voltage. Then you are biased to voltage. Even the method chosen to measure the voltage will affect the results. You have to choose one or another. Every choice reflects a bias. There is no test you can perform that is not biased in some way.

For example, the FDA would never approve a drug based in a bunch of testimonials.

Yes well bad sound never killed anyone. So far as we know. Allowances for your system, of course.

Finally, if a consumer pays several hundred dollars for a tweak, and it has no effect, then consumer would either have to seek a refund or tolerate a noxious cognitive dissonance.

Ahh yes, the noxious cognitive dissonance of the money back guarantee. Right. You got me.

The brain may take a third path, the path of least resistance, that is, to believe in the tweek.

Outgunned. Sheesh.   

willgolf, oregonpapa,

The QSA Violet arrived Thursday. Only had time for the usual warm-up while eating dinner followed by four sides, Tracy Chapman and Neil Diamond Serenade.    

The XLO demagnetizing tracks repeat about a dozen times while the Sovereign spins and the Herron idles for a good 30 minutes or so. Even with all that there is a big improvement the first few minutes. I'm talking every night. The first side always sounds a lot better by the end than at the beginning, and things continue to improve until at around 90-120 minutes it is hugely better than in the beginning.    

So when the beginning of Talkin' 'bout a Revolution sounded terrific I knew the Violet fuse was the Real Deal. One of my favorite ways of knowing you're getting real detail and not stuff being added is when you find you can hear the natural acoustic space. Well, I will have to go back and play Fast Car again because all during that one I was struck by being able to hear her voice reverberate and decay all through the whole song. The reason I say go back and hear it again is because as the side went along there seemed to be less of this. Like still excellent, but not so obvious. Probably 50/50 this was one of those phases things go through as they burn in. Some don't care for these kinds of changes as things burn in. I freaking love it. Just wish I could snap my fingers and freeze it sometimes though.  

Probably the biggest most obvious and consistent improvement is in the clarity and dynamics of transients. Not just the attack though, the body and tone of the note are nice and full too. Chapman has a lot of bongo drums, both the skin and the body of the drum are to the point it sounds almost like a musical instrument as much playing a note as percussion. Her voice on my pressing can have a bit of an edge or glare to it at times, this is still there but much less, much more natural sounding now.  

By the time Neil Diamond was done this was all quite a bit better to the point I hated having to work the next day. It will be so nice when I'm retired and can listen as late as I want. This is only an hour or two of current running through it and already I am a very happy camper!  

The QSA Violet has two very small bits of black adhesive tape kind of things stuck on, each a little less than 1mm thick and wide that wrap about 1/3 of the way around the fuse and located about 1/3 of the way in from each end. People who doubt the whole thing might want to stop and think about that. Why two pieces? Why not just one? It is time and money to cut and stick two vs one. Pictures on the Tweakgeek website show what looks like a big piece of this same tape on the most expensive fuse.    

Could it be this is what exerts the force that puts all these thoughts in my head? It must be something like that, I mean we all know a fuse could never affect the sound, and my brain being too lazy to go for the noxious refund would surely be overworked to come up with such a detailed description on its own. Right?    

Kidding. Just, if you want to live rent free, this is how we do it.  

SR Purple supposed to start shipping next week. Guess I will have to get one to compare. This Violet was against Light Blue. Which I liked better than Orange. Also have a Yellow, but it is planned for the Herron. That one is a lot more work to get at the fuse. We will just have to see how it goes I guess.

I am reminded when hopelessly outgunned try and pretend nobody noticed.

When you plug it in and try it out, that is a test. When the tweak works, it is proven. All the more so when it has been proven to work over and over again with hundreds and thousands of people across a wide range of systems. Fuses are tested and proven to work.    

An analogy: despite an apparent lack of experience some people nevertheless opine. That doesn't mean their opinions are tested or proven true.

Remember, that first fuse did blow. Very likely thermal stress over time had worn the filament, but gradually so you didn’t notice.

In any case it is easy to understand. A great deal of very critical power goes through the thinnest wire in the whole system. A wire deliberately intended to be just barely thick enough to not melt every time you turn it on. Not exactly ideal design parameters for sound quality. No wonder when the design goals shift to improved power transmission aftermarket fuses prove they are worth every penny. In other words, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.