fuse ratings

[andrew ivimey]

ummmmmmmmmm a thousand years ago I began an apprenticeship as a 'sparks' and one of my first jobs, having searched out left handed screwdrivers etc etc, was to file down the plates on contact breakers and oh boy, did I get into trouble until I got it right! - a few thou was acceptable... grudgingly. I got to see the results of crappy circuit breakers later on. It was impressively spectacleeer.

just a thought.

[soulminer]

You got it Andrew. Part of my apprenticeship many moons ago was to lap in the faces of three phase and single phase circuit breaker contacts for aircraft electrical systems. Again, some of the results from less than near-perfect contact faces were quite amazing. Arc welded is not enough to describe them....

John, I am sure your parts are as shiny, greased and well adjusted as the day they were pressed into service..... If you're living in a vacuum that is....

I used to use re-generated AC for calibrating test equipment and sensitive components, so mains quality is important, but even the military don't use "special" fuses in ground equipment and I recall half of the parts we got from stores were pretty bog standard stuff, with some still in the RS or Farnell bag with an MoD sticker over the top !!

No... These fuses are a little too ridiculous in my opinion and are the product (one of many) of the over-active imaginations of hot-shot marketing boffins (like RA), that spy a gap in the market of OCD hi-fi tweakers chasing a holy grail with seemingly endless supplies of cash to waste. Good on 'em I say. If people are daft enough and all that...

Like a friend of mine once told me about a product he was taking to market... "If a good quality item is priced too cheap, some people won't buy it, as they think they are getting poor quality for their money. If the exact same item is much higher in price, the same people think they are getting something special and I sell out in no time !! "

Nowt as queer as folk.....

[Guy Pettigrew]

Hello Mr Soulminer

Being called a fool doesn't sit easily with me.

Whether it's as in "audiophool" or as in "a fool and his money.."

Do you remember the beginning of the cable debate? All cables are the same, was the prevailing view. Then people started building different types of cables. They sounded diffrent. Amazingly, some sounded better. There began the huge Hi Fi cable industry we have today.

Do you have high spec cables, or the ones which came with your kit?

Today I've bought a pair of Charcroft reisitors to use as in line series resistors in the stepped attenuators in my WD Pre 3. About £50 the pair. If they sound better am I deluding myself? Or perhaps they really are better? I won't know until I fit them in a couple of days.

You listened to all the Russ Andrews mains cable stuff and couldn't hear any improvement. How sad.

Do you think mains transformers inside amps can make a difference? Or do you believe it's just stuff outside the kit which is not worth bothering about?

Guy

[pre65]

I think it is not good to suggest that anyone who hears things we can't is a fool, thats getting personal !

Some of the things we now take for granted are easier to understand when we (or others !) can work out WHY.

Things like transformers, or even different types of capacitor can be explained, but fuses ?

[Guy Pettigrew]

Hello Philip, ever the diplomat!

Who knows why fuses make a system sound different? But if they do, they do.

If we can't measure or understand it, it just means we can't measure properly, and our understanding is limited. The curse and the greatness of the human race.

One of my greates Hi Fi amazements was discovering how the various makes of 5U4G rectifiers sounded so radically different in my WAD 300B PSEs. Who'd have thought a rectifier was so important? Well, actually, probably everyone else on this board! It was a revelation to me, though.

Guy

[soulminer]

Originally Posted by Guy Pettigrew

Hello Mr Soulminer

Being called a fool doesn't sit easily with me.

But no one here has called you a fool Guy, certainly not I (ooh... that rhymes).

Originally Posted by Guy Pettigrew

Whether it's as in "audiophool" or as in "a fool and his money.."

Again, no one here has mentioned the word fool, Guy. Read all of the posts again. "Audiophool" is a well known, tongue-in-cheek phrase described here. Take it as you wish, but I think spending hundreds or even thousands on cables, fuses, caps and resistors may well meet the requirements of the description. Take it up with the lexicographers, not me.

Originally Posted by Guy Pettigrew

You listened to all the Russ Andrews mains cable stuff and couldn't hear any improvement. How sad.

Nope.... No improvement whatsoever I am afraid, over my home-made screened triple core Belden cables with Crabtree plugs and IEC connectors that probably cost a fiver to make myself. However, I think it rather sad that somebody would feel it necessary to buy all that RA stuff at super inflated prices to enjoy their music.

Originally Posted by Guy Pettigrew

Do you think mains transformers inside amps can make a difference? Or do you believe it's just stuff outside the kit which is not worth bothering about?

It's not that they're not worth bothering about Guy, but it's all about laws of diminishing returns IMHO, and having heard first hand, A-B-A, the differences (or lack of) in my system, in my house, to my ears, between a £5 mains cable and a £1000 cable with fancy plugs, it's a no brainer for me I am afraid.

It's all my opinion and I am certainly not calling anyone on this forum a fool. If it works for you, go for it. Just saying that it does absolutely nothing for me and never will. My loss is your gain if you look at it like that, so maybe I am the fool....

This is a good read.
http://www.roger-russell.com/wire/wire.htm#wiretable

[pre65]

Thanks Will.

A good read if you have the time to go through it all.

[Guy Pettigrew]

Thanks for the link to the article, Will

Excellently written and very interesting.

The suggestion that those of us who hear cable differences can only hear them because we've spent loads of money on them is always an interesting one. Plausible, but not neccesarily true.

Mind you, the author of the article seems to be coming from the opposite end. His position seems to be "I don't believe there can be an audible difference, so I can't hear one".

As for me, I have no doubt mains cables, interconnects and 'speaker cables can help bring the best out of a Hi Fi system.

It seems sensible. After all, different makes and dates of valves , different types of coupling capacitors, resistors etc all sound different. Some are significantly better than others.

There's a question in the article about "how short does a piece of wire need to be before it makes no difference?". Well, it depends, doesn't it? If I may be permitted to exaggerate to make a point; If the signal from a low output moving coil cartrisge was routed through a 5mm length of heavily corroded steel wire dredged up from the sea bed, I'd expect it to disastrously affect the sound. So, in this case, 5mm of good quality wire replacing the corroded stuff would make a positive difference.

Guy

[pre65]

It was interesting to see how a major manufacturer had to alter it's policy on "cheap" cables because of the impact on its sales of amps !

The "public" now seem to be "educated" that expensive cables are a "must have" regardless of their perhaps dubious benefits.

But then I don't own, or even aspire to, a Rolex watch.