Synergistic Red Fuse ...

OK, so I have been reading this wonderful thread, and a while back I had this idea. My fuses are of the smaller kind (20mm) and they just so happen to be exactly 4 Ga. in thickness. Home Depot sells 4 Ga. grounding wire which is solid core copper bare wire. At $1.11 per foot you can make a bunch of "fuses" from that. So I got some, and with a hacksaw (which took less than a minute) was able to make a segment that is the same length and of course width as a fuse.

Now I know I am effectively putting a 100 Amp fuse in there, but it's only an experiment for a short time. I'm going to see if it makes any difference in the sound. So now to my question... Who thinks the solid copper rod will sound better, worse, or about the same as one of those fancy $100 fuses? Again, this is only an experiment to see if there is an audible improvement. I know people are saying things like "substantial", "dramatic", even "night and day", but audiophiles throw these terms around to describe minute differences sometimes, and before I spend hundreds I want to see what a buck will do.

Charles 1:

Congratulations on a wonderful taken path to sonic improvement. The wall A/C receptacle and equipment fuses have a significant effect on the sound produced by the system. 

Once an audiophile has these bottlenecks removed the sound is so much better.

And finally overcoming the fear of changing a wall receptacle or a fuse in a piece of equipment is actually quite liberating!

David Pritchard

koestner, I know Mike Farnsworth of past Talon Audio fame did just that with his personal Edge amps,replacing the cheap fuses with solid bar copper instead. He said it was a fantastic tweak that he loved and he never looked back. Of course you would do so at your own risk.

I had the Synergistic Red fuse before on a previous source and it definitely imparted its own sound signature - glossy with sizzle.

I now have the Audio Magic Beeswax installed on my Exemplar DAC.

I had spoken to Jerry at Audio Magic before taking the leap, but he really underplayed how much of an upgrade it would be. 

Voices and instruments sound like . . voices and instruments.

But perhaps more importantly it drops the noise floor significantly so you get more music, texture, and dynamics.

The grit and scratchiness that you're used to hearing is reduced.

This is most obvious in the background layers of a track that you've heard a thousand times. They are no longer congested and presented to you in broad daylight.

I'm not sure how a fuse does all of this and I wasn't expecting this big leap in musical flow and engagement.

It's different than connecting a top of the line Entreq grounding box to your source, though they are complementary.

The closest experience I've had was swapping my interconnects for Ziro Disclosure. The Ziros dropped the noise floor and all of the sudden there was so much more music and dynamics.

I just wanted to write this to thank Jerry at Audio Magic for developing this fuse and making it available to us.

Well, you know, since all wire is directional, not just fuses, it all depends on which direction you insert the copper rod as to whether it will sound better than the fuse you're replacing, assuming of course that the direction of the fuse was correct in the first place.  There's a 50% chance it wasn't correct.