[Archguy]

Whatever became of this?  Did fuses of a higher rating help Steve with his sinus issues?

My MMGs (which I love, esp now that they are on raised stands) say "4-amp" on the fuses and I'd like to play with higher ratings.  Just seems like the stock fuses are incredibly thin to be carrying the same signal that many of us obsess over elsewhere in the path.  Or do I have that wrong?

OTOH, I don't want to do away with them entirely, and I see no reason to.  And FWIW I'm not talking about 'audiophile grade' fuses, whatever they may be.  I just want to go up to 5 or 10 amperes and it suddenly seems like 5 won't be worth the trouble.'

Any thoughts?  My knowledge is next to nothing so please don't get too excited.

[SteveFord]

I forgot all about this.
No huge Fuse Shoot Out as I'm just now finishing paying off my retirement motorcycle.
Priorities!

[josh358]

Yeah, maybe.  But if contact resistance might be a significant portion of audibility improvement, then what does that say about the "sound" of the fuse elements themselves? 
There's nothing about these fuses that makes any sense from an objective viewpoint.  It's disappointing to see people wasting money on this type of nonsense.

Dave.

I don't think it's an issue of contact (or fuse) resistance. Rather, if the fuse contacts or holders are dirty or corrode, they start to rectify the signal and that sounds awful. It's measurable as distortion but sounds much worse than the distortion figures suggest.

The old fuseholders in my IVA's have gotten scratchy, and I wasn't able to fix it with Deoxit. Maybe some fine sandpaper . . . but I'm going to give Magnepan a call and see if they still stock replacements. And there's always Roger's solution.

By the way, Mark Winey bypassed the fuses on his own Maggies, but when the guys at Magenpan tried bypassing the fuses in a blind test they couldn't hear a difference. As you of course know, fuses become nonlinear at high levels so potentially they could adversely affect the sound, but I doubt that you'll hear a bit of harmonic distortion on program peaks, hell, people can't even here a few dB of hard clipping.

On the other hand, there's a real advantage to getting the audiophile fuses -- you won't be tempted to run your speakers at hazardous levels because the fuses are so damn expensive!

[josh358]

Whatever became of this?  Did fuses of a higher rating help Steve with his sinus issues?

My MMGs (which I love, esp now that they are on raised stands) say "4-amp" on the fuses and I'd like to play with higher ratings.  Just seems like the stock fuses are incredibly thin to be carrying the same signal that many of us obsess over elsewhere in the path.  Or do I have that wrong?

OTOH, I don't want to do away with them entirely, and I see no reason to.  And FWIW I'm not talking about 'audiophile grade' fuses, whatever they may be.  I just want to go up to 5 or 10 amperes and it suddenly seems like 5 won't be worth the trouble.'

Any thoughts?  My knowledge is next to nothing so please don't get too excited.

Thin doesn't matter if the wire is short. That's because what's of concern here is total resistance, and resistance is resistivity * distance. When you have a thin wire, the resistivity goes up, but because the length of a fuse is short, the total resistance increases very little.

Also, a 4 amp fuse isn't exactly puny, it comes out to 64 watts, and remember, that's just going to your tweeter, which draws less power than your woofer. But remember too that at 64 watts, your tweeter is generating as much heat as a 60 watt light bulb! And that's just over the small area of the tweeter, which is made of plastic that will deform if it gets too hot, and then you're in for a very expensive repair, basically a new driver, which is to say you might as well just buy a new pair of MMG's.

64 watts will give you roughly 103 dB at your listening seat, and that's average power -- figure that transients will be 10 dB above that, or 113 dB. It's quite reasonable for a tweeter.

The fuses have been chosen on the basis of testing to protect your speakers from damage. You might be able to go a bit higher, but at some point, you'll be risking your speakers.

I think a better course with the MMG's is to add a sub as Davey has. That's because before the tweeter fuses blow, the MMG's are limited by their woofers -- in my experience, the woofer starts to intermodulate with the tweeter somewhere in the mid 90 dB SPL range, and the speakers start to sound strained. At that point, you usually don't want to make the volume higher because it just doesn't sound good. But most of the excursion is in the low frequencies -- in a dipole woofer, the excursion actually increases as the cube each time you go down an octave! So if you offload the lower frequencies to a sub, you'll find that the drivers are capable of playing just about as loudly as the largest Maggies, which is plenty loud for sane listening (as opposed to the 120 dB levels of a club, which are dangerous to your hearing).

[josh358]

Send the fuses to me last and I'll test them.....objectively. 

Dave.

I'm reminded of an "ad" that Gordon Holt put in the Stereophile classifieds years ago -- "Fuses, Slightly Blown."

[Archguy]

Thin doesn't matter if the wire is short.... 

Thanks for your comprehensive--and comprehensible--response.  I feel better now about doing nothing.  My listening is almost exclusively acoustic piano jazz these days, and the Maggies really shine with that.  Also, I have other speakers running which cover the low notes when required.  Anyway, you're right that the MMGs are cheap enough that if I do blow them I'll have a great excuse for upgrading to the 1.7s I've had my eye on

[josh358]

Thanks for your comprehensive--and comprehensible--response.  I feel better now about doing nothing.  My listening is almost exclusively acoustic piano jazz these days, and the Maggies really shine with that.  Also, I have other speakers running which cover the low notes when required.  Anyway, you're right that the MMGs are cheap enough that if I do blow them I'll have a great excuse for upgrading to the 1.7s I've had my eye on

Heh.

Maggies are amazing with piano, aren't they. Planars are the only kind of speakers that can reproduce it well. It's the instrument I know best and since I started using a Benchmark AHB2 with my IVA's it's been jaw-droppingly real. I was talking to John Siau about that at AES and he said he's found that even a small amount of harmonic distortion in an amplifier interferes with the sound of piano, and also that low LF group delay is important.