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how much for a fuse,

Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
You’re missing the point. Steve has a scientific bent, and probably scientific qualifications , but not in neuroscience, audiology, perception or similar fields. Therefore, when he says “you imagined it” (or similar) he is talking with no more authority than I am when I posit thoughts as to possible technical explanations.

I get pilloried for mine; he gets a pass for his. Such is the way of things.
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He "gets a pass" because what he says is in agreement published scientific literature. You don't need to be a geologist to know that the earth isn't flat.
 
mansr said:
He "gets a pass" because what he says is in agreement published scientific literature. You don't need to be a geologist to know that the earth isn't flat.
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So neither do you need to be a neuroscientist to know that people imagine stuff. Is that it? Bit feeble, TBH. And unless you’re working in the field in question, how qualified are you to claim ‘agreement with published scientific literature’?
It boils down, as I said above, to “I see no technical explanation for this phenomenon, ergo you must be imagining it. And there’s literature and shit that says people imagine stuff like this, so you must’ve done that’.
 
Brother, can you spare a fuse?

s-l300.jpg
 
Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
So neither do you need to be a neuroscientist to know that people imagine stuff. Is that it? Bit feeble, TBH. And unless you’re working in the field in question, how qualified are you to claim ‘agreement with published scientific literature’?
It boils down, as I said above, to “I see no technical explanation for this phenomenon, ergo you must be imagining it. And there’s literature and shit that says people imagine stuff like this, so you must’ve done that’.
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Do you trust anyone who has expertise different from your own?
 
If all the fuses , power cables, power conditioners , fancy footers , audiophile Ethernet switches and other tweaks in my system are purely tricking my brain and ears into thinking my system sounds better due to placebo effect then so be it.

Before I started experimenting with these things I thought my system sounded a bit dull and my sound stage was narrow and brought my attention to my speakers.

Now my music projects into the room with eiry realism , people spontaneously move to the music or even dance. My sound stage has breadth and depth. Musical instruments sound realistic, piano sounds like piano. I can hear the recording venue in many of my live recordings get a sense of the space.

If all that is purely placebo , then so be it I don't care because it sounds bloody brilliant and I have really enjoyed the journey.

Please don't take advantage of me and suggest I give you all of my money as I'm obviously extremely susceptible to suggestion.

Yours in blissful ignorance

Disco:cool:
 
All our senses can be fooled the most obvious are the optical illusion and for audio if you haven't tried it dummy head stereo. The demo disc I heard gave a very realistic 3D experience with sounds behind, above and even in the next room. Very eerie especially when a young lady whispers in your ear from behind!

Taste is another. I have been to several wine tastings but one that really stood out was at a wine growers villa in the middle of nowhere in South Africa during our Rovos train holiday. We were provided with a range of the estates wines from dry whites through to deep reds and a piece of food for each one. The tasting would start in the usual way with the sniffing, swirling, sipping and spitting followed by discussion and then again after a nibble of the provided food. The transformation in the taste of the wine was unbelievable and is something you really have to experience yourself. I already knew about food and wine parings but this was something else.

When I audition new audio equipment if the change isn't immediately apparent its either not there or is too insignificant to bother. The biggest change I ever heard was on removing a pre-amp from the audio chain. Several weeks later I reinstated it only for it to removed again!

Remember that a lie told often enough becomes the truth and the bigger the lie the more likey it is to be believed. We are subjected to this daily by mega corporations, billionaires and politicians. Oh I forgot snake-oil fraudsters selling expensive HiFi tweeks

Cheers,

DV
 
mansr said:
Do you trust anyone who has expertise different from your own?
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Of course. But I don't trust everyone who has expertise different to my own. The appeal to authority argument is valid to the extent that the authority relied on is genuinely authoritative and understood to be so, and that the authority relied on is directly relevant to the argument case. Too many arguments try to shoehorn what is in reality an edge-case scenario, into something more mainstream as a way of bolstering their case. If you're not an expert in the field, you might not recognise that when it's happening.
 
Fuses make as much difference to the sound as which side of your bathroom cabinet you keep the paracetamol....

Thing is though that fuses have been specifically marketed to the gullible by shysters.

It beggars belief that anyone could be so stupid as to not put together the thought process of the shysters... "OK these audiophools are thicker than a turkey who's just been read 'A Christmas Carol' after a guided tour of the Paxo factory and now can't wait for Xmas, so how can we make some more money out of them?? Hmm... what part of the chain can be accessed by any idiot in seconds with nothing more than a screwdriver and the old part swapped out with the magic new one in seconds? Oh and it HAS to be so easy that anyone will feel confident to do it!" .. "Of course! The fuse! You just remove one screw from the mains plug and everyone's done that and replaced a fuse before! Oh and many other fuses have a carrier on the rear panel which is easy to access... Bingo!"

Why not the other parts of the same circuit? A magic mains switch? A magic IEC socket? Magic 4" long bits of wire between the switch and the fuseholder? Magic fuseholders? Could it be that these are "too technical"? Give people safety concerns? too "inside the box in which here be dragons"?
Best leave all that technical stuff to the experts eh? The very ones telling you that it's impossible for a fuse to make a difference! You really couldn't make it up...

Bizarrely... in the specific case where fuses CAN make a difference, ie when used in speakers to protect drive units and at the output of some amplifiers (when not in the feedback loop), it's very hard to persuade people that they are deleterious and to bypass them! Yes it increases the chance of blown drive units/amplifier under fault conditions or misuse... but it's still no more likely than in the maybe 80%+ of units which DON'T have fuses in these positions.
 
Arkless Electronics said:
Bizarrely... in the specific case where fuses CAN make a difference, ie when used in speakers to protect drive units and at the output of some amplifiers (when not in the feedback loop), it's very hard to persuade people that they are deleterious and to bypass them! Yes it increases the chance of blown drive units/amplifier under fault conditions or misuse... but it's still no more likely than in the maybe 80%+ of units which DON'T have fuses in these positions.
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I do agree, as I've said a few pages upthread, I'm thoroughly agnostic on fuses (and, FWIW, I've never tried 'foo' fuses nor been tempted to) but would you indulge me for a moment and explain why fuses can be deleterious in these situations, but not on the mains feed? Is it down to the argument about PSU producing the DC within the unit, so by then the mains quality/quantity is irrelevant.

JFTAOD, my arguments over the last page or so have largely been in relation to my comments about mains leads (I know your views, fret not, just trying to clarify that the context of my comments upthread here are not about fuses).
 
Returning to the bunker of cold science and engineering for a moment...I'm sitting in a design & dev lab surrounded by RF test equipment (I'm an RF engineer). A receiver I have here (which is a design of my own, though that little trumpet toot is irrelevant) starts getting out of bed at about -125 dBm into 50 Ohms, which is 125 nV rms. That's about 8000 times smaller than the signal generated by a moving coil cartridge. Under the desk is a rat's nest of kettle leads with any old fuse in the plugs. I can't be worrying about the quality of the lead or the fuse when I'm doing small signal measurements. Nor do I need to care - the internal power supplies do their job properly. A £20k low-noise spectrum analyser doesn't need a 2k lead or fancy fuse to meet spec day after day after day.
 
Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
It's conjecture that it applies in the circumstances described. And expectation bias is a term oft misused on here, and doesn't really mean what you imply it means, here. Which all suggests to me that you're just repeating a trope, rather than arguing from any position of genuine knowledge and understanding.

What it boils down to, is this:

"I can find no plausible technical explanation for what you perceive, therefore you probably imagined it. Here's a handy theory, which I'm not that familiar with, which fits my assumption and I'm not too bothered how well it fits."

You're probably familiar with the eye-rolling that genuine scientists give when lay people misappropriate their work. I vaguely recall some people with a genuine understanding of aspects of perceptual science, being rather more circumspect in their views. The confidence you display, suggests ignorance rather than deep understanding, sorry. People with a deep understanding rarely take an absolutist position.
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No, I'm applying Occam's Razor, or possibly more accurately the null hypothesis. That's all. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. For any fuse to have an effect as described would require a rewrite of EVERY electrical law, from Chapter 1 Page 1. I'm not saying it's out of the question, I'm not taking an absolutist position at all, but like the flat earth hypothesis mentioned by mansr above I'm not the one making extraordinary claims. It's not a trope to suggest that the first thing you ask when you see something amazing is "did I really just see that, or did I imagine it?" This is basic science. Only when you are sure that your measurements are reliable can you rely upon them. Ears, eyes, and especially brains are notoriously unreliable. After all, some of us have seen God, and spoken to him. Well, have they really?
So I'm prepared to rewrite electrical science, just as I am prepared to rewrite evolution to fit it all in 6,000 years, but the proponents of this are going to have to do a lot better than "I saw/heard it".
 
Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
Of course. But I don't trust everyone who has expertise different to my own. The appeal to authority argument is valid to the extent that the authority relied on is genuinely authoritative and understood to be so, and that the authority relied on is directly relevant to the argument case. Too many arguments try to shoehorn what is in reality an edge-case scenario, into something more mainstream as a way of bolstering their case. If you're not an expert in the field, you might not recognise that when it's happening.
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Who would you trust on the topic of sensory fallibility? Did you look at any of the links I posted?
 
Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
It boils down, as I said above, to “I see no technical explanation for this phenomenon, ergo you must be imagining it. And there’s literature and shit that says people imagine stuff like this, so you must’ve done that’.
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No. It's "this overturns everything that has gone before, and not only do we have no explanation but if it's true then I don't know how the bloody hell ANYTHING works any more. Are you sure about this? Because we need to be sure. Until you have come up with a comprehensive case for this I have to assume that you are mistaken."
"Furthermore, have you considered the possibility that you may have misread the meter or otherwise imagined it? I know I have before now".

Oh, and yes, "there are papers and shit covering the fact that not every witness testimony is entirely reliable."
 
Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
I do agree, as I've said a few pages upthread, I'm thoroughly agnostic on fuses (and, FWIW, I've never tried 'foo' fuses nor been tempted to) but would you indulge me for a moment and explain why fuses can be deleterious in these situations, but not on the mains feed? Is it down to the argument about PSU producing the DC within the unit, so by then the mains quality/quantity is irrelevant.

JFTAOD, my arguments over the last page or so have largely been in relation to my comments about mains leads (I know your views, fret not, just trying to clarify that the context of my comments upthread here are not about fuses).
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FWIW fuses will make slightly more difference than mains leads... Still none... but if such things mattered...

Fuses protecting drive units are in the signal path and at a high current where the fuse will experience heating in sympathy with the signal, which produces non linear changes in the resistance of the fuse and hence measurable distortion. It's at its worst at low frequencies due to the fairly long time constant but also responds to the envelope of the signal. The problem is that a fuse of low enough rating to offer some degree of protection will cause this distortion and a fuse rated high enough for it to be negligible will offer negligible protection.
 
mindlagoon said:
Returning to the bunker of cold science and engineering for a moment...I'm sitting in a design & dev lab surrounded by RF test equipment (I'm an RF engineer). A receiver I have here (which is a design of my own, though that little trumpet toot is irrelevant) starts getting out of bed at about -125 dBm into 50 Ohms, which is 125 nV rms. That's about 8000 times smaller than the signal generated by a moving coil cartridge. Under the desk is a rat's nest of kettle leads with any old fuse in the plugs. I can't be worrying about the quality of the lead or the fuse when I'm doing small signal measurements. Nor do I need to care - the internal power supplies do their job properly. A £20k low-noise spectrum analyser doesn't need a 2k lead or fancy fuse to meet spec day after day after day.
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Precisely!

Off topic... what frequency and for what SINAD are those RF results?
 
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