Audiophile Fuses
- Thread starter MylesBAstor
- Start date
After about 50 hours, the orange fuse started retreating sonically. I pulled it out and it looked slightly singed at both ends and returned. Put back the stock fuse. Not bad (unlike my monoblock big amps which are dramatically improved with the blue fuses).
I have The Sr orange fuse in every piece of gear I own, and they are not retreating as you say at all? Question?? Did you upsize the fuse at all, or did you just buy the direct amperage replacement. There were threads about this, I upsized all of my fuses, due to inrush current at turn on. Everything works and sounds amazing.
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Man, it's gotten to the point where my ears just aren't happy with any piece of gear without an aftermarket (SR or AM) fuse in it.
I have a really expensive DAC that has no fuse but what seems to be an internal breaker, which would seem to be a superior system. This DAC had a PSU issue, so I sent it off for repair and then swapped in my old Mytek Manhattan II DAC with SR Purple. I was immediately hearing more punch, more low end, more tonal vibrance, and much lower noise than the over engineered high-end DAC. It was just more free and musical, rocking out way harder. Granted, the detail, separation, smoothness weren't on par because of the huge engineering and price delta.
I started really wishing I could just put an SR Purple or AM M1 into my high end DAC, but I can't. To accomplish a similar thing I have to keep investing in various power and grounding products to try and remove noise and increase current from the outside...
I'm honestly considering talking to the manufacturer about this, because whatever these fuses are doing, I need it.
I have a really expensive DAC that has no fuse but what seems to be an internal breaker, which would seem to be a superior system. This DAC had a PSU issue, so I sent it off for repair and then swapped in my old Mytek Manhattan II DAC with SR Purple. I was immediately hearing more punch, more low end, more tonal vibrance, and much lower noise than the over engineered high-end DAC. It was just more free and musical, rocking out way harder. Granted, the detail, separation, smoothness weren't on par because of the huge engineering and price delta.
I started really wishing I could just put an SR Purple or AM M1 into my high end DAC, but I can't. To accomplish a similar thing I have to keep investing in various power and grounding products to try and remove noise and increase current from the outside...
I'm honestly considering talking to the manufacturer about this, because whatever these fuses are doing, I need it.
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My friend only used the fuse for 10 minutes. He gave it to me and the first 15 hours in the correct direction it was a little dark sounding but superior to the stock glass fuse. From 15 to 20 hours it became too bright so I just left the pre-amp on for another two days. After about 70 hours, voila, the fuse stabilized and it sounded fantastic! It is by far the biggest improvement in the 864. The line tubes are a Mullard CV4004 industrial tube with unique wide frequency, very dynamic, neutral but colorful tone and neutral mids. Next is the cleartop RCA 12AU7. The phono was a Sylvania D getter 12AX7 and a pair of double silicon dampening rings on the stock Ei 12AX7s. Sitting on a trio of Stillpoints Ultra SS and granite slab. Superior high end cabling as well. No reviewer did this to the pre-amp when they reviewed the 864 and gave it good but not great reviews. These are the difference makers, especially the fuse.
If you put an SR orange fuse in the wrong way, will it be evident or is it only a slight difference. Also can they be damaged by wrong way installation.
Ok I am sure I have them all in the correct way. The SR label on the left of the fuse, is what I will call the input power coming from the wall. So I took my ohm meter and made sure I knew which part of the fuse holder is the input from the wall on the hot conductor. That is how I installed them.
Good idea! Though listening is the final test. The industry standard for inlets is left to right, back to front (facing the back).
I know what I was doing. The orange fuse in my EAR 890 just didn't make more than a 10% improvement in the sound (a little more open, clearer highs). I am ordering the purple fuse. I now have 4 blue fuses in my systems and love it. I gave my black outlet plugs and fuse to my friend who loves them over his hospital grade outlet and stock glass fuse. My late friend Frank had a 9 page Audiogon forum about the superiority of the purple over the orange fuse.
Huh? Audio fuses...again???
One would think that everything that can be said about audiiophile fuses has already been said on this thread. But honestly, I have no idea since I’m not planning on reading all 1152 posts. If you’re expecting to find out what the “best” fuse is for you in your system, you won’t find it in this post. Rather, I wanted to share some systemic information that you might find useful if you go down the fuse rabbit hole looking for a fuse that will make your system sing just a bit better.
My recent exploration of fuses started with a casual PM conversation with Mark at Sablon Audio as we discussed what fuse might be nice to try in the Extreme and assorted other gear. He suggested I might try a fuse from Padis, who OEM’s the fuses by Furutech. What Mark said that really prompted my fuse exploration was his analogy that fuses are like spices for food. They can change the flavorings and just like salt, pepper and other condiments and spices, can change the flavor to your liking…or not. I was surprised to look at my Soulution 725 only to see that a Padis fuse was being used there as factory stock. However, since I’m not exactly a fan of rhodium, I thought I might explore some other “flavors” of fuses. This exploration then expanded to the Lampizator as well. The real challenge was to try and figure out if there was some general guidance I could use in choosing a fuse without the need to try every fuse ever made, which would be an impossible task.
Ali Express is kind of like a hardware store for audio stuff. Like a hardware store, you often don’t know you need someting until you walk by it or in the case of Ali Express, until you see the ad for an item. In Ali Express, there’s not a lot of rationale for what get presented to you. However, it's pretty easy to search for audio fuses.
In general however, after searching a dozen or so fuse manufacturers, it’s fairly easy to see that all audiophile fuses have basically the same basic components, and it is these components that might vary among different manufacturers. Learning this now gave me at least some direcit9on for picking a fuse and possibly understand why it might work well (or not) when I tried it in a specific application. This is the information that I hope you might find as useful as I did.
From this pic, you can see there are 5 basic components of a fuse
1) The end caps- they are generally made of tin or copper and may be plated in gold or silver.
2) The caps inside the end caps (that the fuse wire is soldered to). Some brands such as Brimar state they use Mundorf gold and silver solder. Most do not specify their solder material
3) The “pipe”. Most of us are familiar with glass but may many are made of ceramic material.
4) The fuse wire itself. It can be silver, copper , or in some cases, there are dual metals such as silver wrapped in copper wire:
Alternately, hybrid material such as a copper/silver blended wire can be used as the fuse wire (i.e. Brimar) as well as “nanocrystalline alloy”.
You might also see materials listed such as this
"nano-super-high molecular" technology, using long fibers immersed in invisible super-high molecules”.
The scientist in me naturally wondered what “nano-super-high molecular technology” could they possibly be using? Even more puzzling was trying to wonder if invisible molecules are really present, and moreover, if they are “super-high”, what exactly are they high on? Alas, no answers were immediately forthcoming to either query anywhere in the product description. Ah, the wonders of marketing. Who makes these things up? I doubt its anyone from Harvard or Wharton, but I may be wrong! It was obviously another marketing genius who was responsible for bestowing this ridiculous brand name for a fuse manufacturer.
5) The material packed around the fuse wire. This can be a variety of materials from quartz sand, to nanographene to flooby dust or some other strange (proprietary of course) material.
How these materials are packed also varies by manufacturer. Here are two examples.
I should mention that some fuses state they are packed with some type of mineral oil, but I would be very reluctant to try these for an obvious reason. If one of those fuses blew, I don’t want to take a chance that I might have to clean oil out of a fuse holder in an IEC outlet. I’ll stick with the assortment of other solid flooby dust materials, thank you very much.
You may also find some manufacturers cryo process their fuses. It’s also worth pointing out that some manufacturers specify a fuse orientation; others do not.
The take away from this is that you can avoid a lot of confusion if you understand what a fuse is comprised of. If, for example, you found a fuse you wish to try that has silver end caps, silver wire and quarts glass packing, it makes little sense to buy another fuse that is made of the same components. You might want to try one with different features instead. There aren’t that many options to try if you stick to the most common variants, even though the plethora of brand names can be daunting. I suspect that many of these fuses are made by the same manufacturer but are branded with many different labels, most of which I’ve never heard of. So the details of the what a fuse contains is probably more important than any brand of label that you see. I would also add that if a manufacturer did not describe or show me an exploded view of their fuse, I avoided the brand altogether since they provided no useful information that I could use to correlate sound with materials. Some might say that’s not important as its only SQ that counts. And that’s a reasonable approach as well, just not one I was interested in exploring.
Finally, I found one brand of fuses that I found very interesting.
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803031260117.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.0.0.75badd8ch3aY8E&algo_pvid=d0500f1a-f709-4399-b03b-2ad8e4c0fb4e&algo_exp_id=d0500f1a-f709-4399-b03b-2ad8e4c0fb4e-1&pdp_ext_f={"sku_id":"12000024707421986"}&pdp_npi=2@dis!USD!40.62!37.78!!!!!@210318bb16722615959166692e1c5e!12000024707421986!sea&curPageLogUid=Q4hbGQzE1Xns
You will note that this manufacturer makes fuses of different colors and these colors are priced differently. Hmmm…this sounds very suspiciously like the famed QSA fuses that have been reviewed elsewhere in this forum. You will recall that the QSA fuses come in different colors as well that are separated by price point. One difference is that the fuses listed above range from sapphire color ($37) to Dragon Red ($554) whereas the QSA fuses range from inexpensive to thousands of dollars! Could the “CreateAudio” fuses in the ad above be the OEM for the QSA fuses? I have no idea and I suspect that it will not be easy to learn the true answer to this question although certain similarities seem like more than coincidence to me. (the different color body at different prices and the use of the much ballyhooed words “quantum and nano” by both manufacturers).
In any event, I’ve been exploring a few of the rather modest cost fuses on Ali Express and have found that indeed I have a preference for some over others in a specific application, but this is still a work in progress. I will share that I did not find a better fuse for the Extreme than the one supplied by Taiko, which I believe is a gold capped ceramic body fuse (not sure of the brand). Happy hunting.
One would think that everything that can be said about audiiophile fuses has already been said on this thread. But honestly, I have no idea since I’m not planning on reading all 1152 posts. If you’re expecting to find out what the “best” fuse is for you in your system, you won’t find it in this post. Rather, I wanted to share some systemic information that you might find useful if you go down the fuse rabbit hole looking for a fuse that will make your system sing just a bit better.
My recent exploration of fuses started with a casual PM conversation with Mark at Sablon Audio as we discussed what fuse might be nice to try in the Extreme and assorted other gear. He suggested I might try a fuse from Padis, who OEM’s the fuses by Furutech. What Mark said that really prompted my fuse exploration was his analogy that fuses are like spices for food. They can change the flavorings and just like salt, pepper and other condiments and spices, can change the flavor to your liking…or not. I was surprised to look at my Soulution 725 only to see that a Padis fuse was being used there as factory stock. However, since I’m not exactly a fan of rhodium, I thought I might explore some other “flavors” of fuses. This exploration then expanded to the Lampizator as well. The real challenge was to try and figure out if there was some general guidance I could use in choosing a fuse without the need to try every fuse ever made, which would be an impossible task.
Ali Express is kind of like a hardware store for audio stuff. Like a hardware store, you often don’t know you need someting until you walk by it or in the case of Ali Express, until you see the ad for an item. In Ali Express, there’s not a lot of rationale for what get presented to you. However, it's pretty easy to search for audio fuses.
In general however, after searching a dozen or so fuse manufacturers, it’s fairly easy to see that all audiophile fuses have basically the same basic components, and it is these components that might vary among different manufacturers. Learning this now gave me at least some direcit9on for picking a fuse and possibly understand why it might work well (or not) when I tried it in a specific application. This is the information that I hope you might find as useful as I did.
From this pic, you can see there are 5 basic components of a fuse
1) The end caps- they are generally made of tin or copper and may be plated in gold or silver.
2) The caps inside the end caps (that the fuse wire is soldered to). Some brands such as Brimar state they use Mundorf gold and silver solder. Most do not specify their solder material
3) The “pipe”. Most of us are familiar with glass but may many are made of ceramic material.
4) The fuse wire itself. It can be silver, copper , or in some cases, there are dual metals such as silver wrapped in copper wire:
Alternately, hybrid material such as a copper/silver blended wire can be used as the fuse wire (i.e. Brimar) as well as “nanocrystalline alloy”.
You might also see materials listed such as this
"nano-super-high molecular" technology, using long fibers immersed in invisible super-high molecules”.
The scientist in me naturally wondered what “nano-super-high molecular technology” could they possibly be using? Even more puzzling was trying to wonder if invisible molecules are really present, and moreover, if they are “super-high”, what exactly are they high on? Alas, no answers were immediately forthcoming to either query anywhere in the product description. Ah, the wonders of marketing. Who makes these things up? I doubt its anyone from Harvard or Wharton, but I may be wrong! It was obviously another marketing genius who was responsible for bestowing this ridiculous brand name for a fuse manufacturer.
5) The material packed around the fuse wire. This can be a variety of materials from quartz sand, to nanographene to flooby dust or some other strange (proprietary of course) material.
How these materials are packed also varies by manufacturer. Here are two examples.
I should mention that some fuses state they are packed with some type of mineral oil, but I would be very reluctant to try these for an obvious reason. If one of those fuses blew, I don’t want to take a chance that I might have to clean oil out of a fuse holder in an IEC outlet. I’ll stick with the assortment of other solid flooby dust materials, thank you very much.
You may also find some manufacturers cryo process their fuses. It’s also worth pointing out that some manufacturers specify a fuse orientation; others do not.
The take away from this is that you can avoid a lot of confusion if you understand what a fuse is comprised of. If, for example, you found a fuse you wish to try that has silver end caps, silver wire and quarts glass packing, it makes little sense to buy another fuse that is made of the same components. You might want to try one with different features instead. There aren’t that many options to try if you stick to the most common variants, even though the plethora of brand names can be daunting. I suspect that many of these fuses are made by the same manufacturer but are branded with many different labels, most of which I’ve never heard of. So the details of the what a fuse contains is probably more important than any brand of label that you see. I would also add that if a manufacturer did not describe or show me an exploded view of their fuse, I avoided the brand altogether since they provided no useful information that I could use to correlate sound with materials. Some might say that’s not important as its only SQ that counts. And that’s a reasonable approach as well, just not one I was interested in exploring.
Finally, I found one brand of fuses that I found very interesting.
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256803031260117.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.0.0.75badd8ch3aY8E&algo_pvid=d0500f1a-f709-4399-b03b-2ad8e4c0fb4e&algo_exp_id=d0500f1a-f709-4399-b03b-2ad8e4c0fb4e-1&pdp_ext_f={"sku_id":"12000024707421986"}&pdp_npi=2@dis!USD!40.62!37.78!!!!!@210318bb16722615959166692e1c5e!12000024707421986!sea&curPageLogUid=Q4hbGQzE1Xns
You will note that this manufacturer makes fuses of different colors and these colors are priced differently. Hmmm…this sounds very suspiciously like the famed QSA fuses that have been reviewed elsewhere in this forum. You will recall that the QSA fuses come in different colors as well that are separated by price point. One difference is that the fuses listed above range from sapphire color ($37) to Dragon Red ($554) whereas the QSA fuses range from inexpensive to thousands of dollars! Could the “CreateAudio” fuses in the ad above be the OEM for the QSA fuses? I have no idea and I suspect that it will not be easy to learn the true answer to this question although certain similarities seem like more than coincidence to me. (the different color body at different prices and the use of the much ballyhooed words “quantum and nano” by both manufacturers).
In any event, I’ve been exploring a few of the rather modest cost fuses on Ali Express and have found that indeed I have a preference for some over others in a specific application, but this is still a work in progress. I will share that I did not find a better fuse for the Extreme than the one supplied by Taiko, which I believe is a gold capped ceramic body fuse (not sure of the brand). Happy hunting.
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In my view, seeing a fuse as primarily "spice" is a conceptual mistake. Rather, I view the fuse as a special kind of power cord, one that has a dual function. Most importantly, it's the last part, or continuation, of the power cord from AC supply to the component's power supply unit (or transformer?). As Paul McGowan frequently and I think correctly points out, the quality of the power supply is the most important part of a component for determining sound quality; i.e., what gets to the rest of the circuit is determined by the power supply. The quality of the fuse is the ultimate determinant of what the power supply sees.
The "spice" of a fuse (or power cord) has primarily to do with its tonality, and of course different fuses have different tonalities by design, just as power cords do; i.e., they are voiced. But to see a fuse primarily as spice, rather than as a component fundamental to determining the sound quality of the receiving components, seems to me to upside down.
The "spice" of a fuse (or power cord) has primarily to do with its tonality, and of course different fuses have different tonalities by design, just as power cords do; i.e., they are voiced. But to see a fuse primarily as spice, rather than as a component fundamental to determining the sound quality of the receiving components, seems to me to upside down.
Great info Marty. I think your spot on. When I am grain orienting wire, I take about a 4 inch piece of wire and insert it into a line splitter of sorts and flip it back and forth till I hear the grain. I believe what I do is foundation work as you can't really change it when the walls are complete.
I view anything you can readily change as more a spice. A cord, cable, duplex, fuse etc. And these devices are adding an audible character. They can either either improve, detract or merely shift the sound we hear. And like my 4 inch test wire, it only takes a little piece to be heard.
Again, great work on breaking down the parts of a fuse. Its helpful to understand how the elements and make up if a fuse can shape sound. I understand how the internal wire and end caps may shape the direction of what we hear. I have no idea what the packing material does.
Did you find a pattern between silica vs Nano vs other materials. Do they have a general sonic chatacter to expect from that mateirals .
Rex
I view anything you can readily change as more a spice. A cord, cable, duplex, fuse etc. And these devices are adding an audible character. They can either either improve, detract or merely shift the sound we hear. And like my 4 inch test wire, it only takes a little piece to be heard.
Again, great work on breaking down the parts of a fuse. Its helpful to understand how the elements and make up if a fuse can shape sound. I understand how the internal wire and end caps may shape the direction of what we hear. I have no idea what the packing material does.
Did you find a pattern between silica vs Nano vs other materials. Do they have a general sonic chatacter to expect from that mateirals .
Rex
Rex, I have no clue what any individual fuse component brings to the table. All I can do is take each fuse as a whole and try to see if I like it (or not) more than another fuse in a specific application. Knowing the individual components just helps me avoid trying dozens of different fuses as many of them have the same basic construction and component parts.
Did you come to any consensus on what the end caps or internal wire present? Of course, that will be impacted by the fuse cartridge holder.
I still don't know what silver presents like. I have heard it very dark and heavy. I have also heard it fast and light.
Gold always seems softer.
Copped is a baseline. I call it neutral as its my base. Is it really neutral. Not sure. Its just the foundation of electrical distribution so I use it.
I have never used Rhodium.
I tried a gold tipped Hifi Supreme fuse. It did not fit in my Dartzeel. Sat on a table next to a glass fuse, its a tin piece of paper longer. I'm irritated with Dertzeel their fuse holder is that tight. It shoud not be. I have only had a glass fuse in my amp.
My preamp has magnetic breakers built in. Same for my DAC and Server
My new phono pre has a fuse, but its 2 days old. I'm going to break it in before I fiddle.
I still don't know what silver presents like. I have heard it very dark and heavy. I have also heard it fast and light.
Gold always seems softer.
Copped is a baseline. I call it neutral as its my base. Is it really neutral. Not sure. Its just the foundation of electrical distribution so I use it.
I have never used Rhodium.
I tried a gold tipped Hifi Supreme fuse. It did not fit in my Dartzeel. Sat on a table next to a glass fuse, its a tin piece of paper longer. I'm irritated with Dertzeel their fuse holder is that tight. It shoud not be. I have only had a glass fuse in my amp.
My preamp has magnetic breakers built in. Same for my DAC and Server
My new phono pre has a fuse, but its 2 days old. I'm going to break it in before I fiddle.
@marty, While I disagree with the "spice" perspective toward fuses, I appreciate your ability, persistence and patience to take everything apart. However, my understanding is that the key sonically with these fuses, certainly the reputedly best of the bunch, is what's inside, and from what I've seen, at least with Audio Magic beeswax ones, the insides are grains of some kind. My guess is that SR and QSA are probably similar, perhaps with coating of some kind. The price of investigation for them would be relatively or absolutely prohibitive, and might require serious materials analyses. Even then, I would think that to learn much one would have to play around with the variables, including the granular and coating material. End caps don't seem to be that big of a deal.
Rhodium, gold (coated copper?) and plated copper have different sounds. I prefer the latter, e.g., with AC connectors, for their bit of warmth. Rhodium goes in the other direction. I know Alex of WyWires doesn't like using the latter for its sound, and will only do so if insisted upon. Silver has a reputation for being bright and alive, although some more recent applications seem to be able to control or better balance its effects. There's a Belden silver-tinted copper wire that sounded good in an umbilical cord and that one headphone amp maker uses for internal wiring.
Yea, that's a very high level generalization.
I personally feel Rhodium is garbage. Its a poor conductor.
Silver is a mixed bag. Are the highest priced components with pure silver wound inductors and transformers really the best sounding???? Maybe. Silver is an amazing conductor. And somone reciently told me, it becomes more conducive as it tarnishes. I have not validated that statement.
Gold is a go to for connections as it never corrodes. It just became such a foundational element in electrical production for signal wiring that is seems to be a foundational sound to build out from.
Tin is absolute garbage too. Horrible conductor, but cheap so its bonded to all sort of copper parts in electrical infrastructure. Too bad for audio. Not really any issue for your toaster or lights.
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