I’ve already touched on mains issues in some of my blogs – about RFI and also the Quiescent balanced mains supply. But the topic for today is (drumroll) fuses. This blog is partly generic listening optimisation, and partly about the specific advancements Synergistic Research have made with fuses.
Whenever any of us consider anything about cabling, whether it's mains or signal hookup, part of that thinking is about two things – the quality of conductors and the quality of connectors. And with connectors, that includes the conductivity of the surface plating, the quality of the connection (soldered or crimped say) between the conductor and the connector body, and so-on.
And a lot of performance can be thrown away if some of these factors are bad. And the easiest area to fall down in our own systems is with the mains loom. I remember many years ago trying to make slow improvements in an early system I owned, only to suddenly stumble across significant gains by simply cleaning all the 13A plug parts (inc fuse holders and fuses) with Caig Deoxit (a great fluid contact cleaner). If you've not tried this yourself, you should. You might just suddenly have the epiphany about the effects of these things on sound quality, and therefore the possibility that fuses themselves can make a difference.
When we come to fuses, both in mains plugs, and internal fuses in components, we should remember that standard ones are the cheapest way possible to put a piece of fusible conductor in line with our power feed – that has a very poor temperature coefficient of resistance. It's simply a safety device used in every piece of household equipment and has no design requirements whatsoever for sound quality impact.
Okay, now let's switch over to the Synergistic Research story. They have been working for many years on finding ways to reduce a fuse's impact on sound quality. It turns out that having any old fusible conductor wreaks havoc on noise levels. And Synergistic Research are working down at the quantum level, saying that the movement of charge from electron to electron is affected by materials at a quantum level – in cables of all types of course, but particularly in the bottleneck of a fuse.
So, Are you going to try some expensive fuses? I would say you should, provided the rest of your cable loom is of good quality, system setup is good, component quality is good, speakers are transparent and overall your system is revealing enough to clearly hear changes with cables or components. Then, you might just think about those fuses, holding back the possibilities of still greater performance.
See more about Synergistic Research here
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