AC current is not flowing through the fuse. Energy is, in the form of an electromagnetic wave.
That energy cannot exist without the current flow. You are correct in that electromagnetism is always there but it can’t exist without current! This link might help sort things out for you:
http://physicsed.buffalostate.edu/SeatExpts/resource/rhr/rhr.htmSince the satellite delay is known to be 240 ms that means the velocity of the audio signal (voice) through free space is 186,000 miles per second. The speed of light. Now what is the only thing that can travel at the speed of light in free space?
Electrons flow back and forth in a wire. Its useful to examine the way this occurs by using the model of ball bearings in a hose. When you push one ball bearing into one end, instantaneously one leaves the hose at the other end. Electrons work the same way as they are easily exchanged in their respective orbits of adjacent atoms (in a material we call a ’conductor’).
Obviously you didn’t learn this when going to the two week NASA school.
Ralph doesn’t believe in the wire diretionality[sic]. All wire directions in his set up are mixed up. A fuse direction is not significant in an improper set up. Also, the reason he doesn’t believe wire directionality is because he has never heard the difference. I can’t say why he hasn’t heard the difference in his long career in an audio industry.
You are conflating two different issues. First, I don’t go by belief but actual knowledge and there is a difference between the two. Try believing that a bullet fired from a gun pointed at you can’t hurt you and see where that gets you. More to the point: copper crystals in a wire have an alignment. But this alignment cannot affect whether the wire actually conducts differently in one direction as opposed to another on a practical basis. You might be able to measure the diode effect over a very long stretch of wire but in the shorter wires used in actual audio applications its moot and does not affect even the tiny signals emerging from a low output moving coil cartridge (which BTW are relatively high current while being low voltage) with the distances involved in audio applications.
If we approach this from an electro-magnetism point of view we find the that the conclusion is the same.
The funny thing here is that a lot of this stuff are the things that they teach you first when you go to engineering classes, not the last!
But I don’t doubt that when people turn cable around they hear a difference!! There can be a number of things influencing that and until you’ve ruled them out you can’t point at atomic structure as the cause. The method of shielding is going to be a bigger effect, and perhaps as much effect might come from how happy the connectors are themselves as they are seated in each other! We’ve found plenty of machining differences in connectors that came from the same batch- differences not only in the dimensions but also in the quality and thickness of the plating! So just like the fuses, if you put enough current through a cable you can measure the voltage drop at the connectors, and by rotating the RCA connections you can determine the best connection and when you get that, it sounds better.
Connectors play a pretty big role. I’ve heard bad connectors make or break the sound of a component, for example when an adapter connector is used to go from balanced to single-ended. Usually its sounds better to have the proper connectors on the cable to start with.
The problem is there really isn’t a good way to test this in most audiophile’s systems. We did it because we got tired of hearing cables sound different when they were exactly the same cable that we had just been using with the same equipment- why did they sometimes sound better when reseated and other times sound worse??
I found it **really** irritating that we could easily hear differences in power cables, especially when the power cable manufactures often came up with explanations for this that were obviously bogus! So I took a Digital Voltmeter and simply measured the voltage drop from one end of the cable to the other and Voila! - the difference was revealed and stupidly easy to measure.
So instead of making up bizarre stories about quantum, crystals, smoking mirrors and the like, instead maybe its a good idea to ***AT LEAST TRY*** to see if you can sort out a method of correlating a measurement against what you can also hear. Usually you can if you sit down and think about it.
FWIW, for all the obvious BS proposed on this thread, I don’t find it nearly as upsetting and disappointing as when you find an obvious "objectivist’ that proclaims something like there ’can’t be any effect from a power cord’ and then can’t be bothered to at least back up his statements with some sort of measurements!
So in closing just to be clear, here at Atma-Sphere:
We do hear differences in interconnect cable directions. We can measure why this is so easily enough. With RCAs one of the biggest effects are rotation of the connectors so they seat properly and the way the cable is shielded.
We do hear differences in fuse direction and can measure why this is so (and have shown that simply rotating the fuse in the holder can have the same effect). Fuses aren’t directional.
We hear differences in power cables and can measure why this is so, just by measuring the AC voltage drop across the cable.
In the above cases we can do this with a standard 3 1/2 digit DVM. Its not hard. ***You just have to do it!!***
None of this is rocket science and none of it has anything to do with quantum. It just takes a bit of thinking about how to figure out how to do the measurement. I’m not saying that we know how to do all measurements of things that we are able to hear that don’t seem to be in the specs, but the things I just listed we can.
