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Monster cable and the fuse?


Toxicant

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I was working on one of my K-horns the other day, it has a blown tweeter, and I was looking at all the wiring that connects the tweeter and mid range and I got to thinking.

People talk about monster cable the size of a pencil, pure silver wire, maybe even gold wire but I look at the fuse that all these wires run to and from and I wonder what is the need for all this huge wire when the wire inside the fuse is about the size of a human hair?

Because the fuse is only an inch long that tiny strand of wire is fine or would it be better to ditch the fuse?

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if all wire were like a human hair the sound will be bad and weak because the bigger cables are and the smaller their resistance/meter is.

so if you use a thin cable(with a big resistance) from your amp to your speaker it will aweak the sound at each meter even at loud volume.

with a such fuse there is only one inch of "bad" cable wich aweak the sound.

do you understand my answer?(i search my words in english because i m french)

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You assumption is correct.

Having any protective circuit in the chain does have an insertion loss associated with it. In the case of the tiny wire inside the fuse itself which is resistive in nature so that it generates heat in order to overload itself and cause an open at the expected current level and the somewhat tenuous pressure connection in the fuse holder subject to the environment, there is quite a bit of difference in having a fuse/holder and associated solder joints inline or not.

Personally, I would ditch the fuse. The fuses tend to open long before the current exceeds the capability of the woofer which in turn serves to protect the midrange and tweeter drivers from excessive current. Keep the fuse only if you think you might have twitchy gear or might overdrive the speakers beyond their respective design limits.

I believe that the tweeter is supposed to be protected by a diode bridge in some crossovers. I would bag that to for the same reasons.

This is only my opinion, and reflects what I have done on my system.

DM2.gif

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Well, I took the zener diodes & fuses out of the signal path years ago, actually a couple of decades ago. Everytime they went back in, the sound deteriorated. If you don't abuse the speakers...or your ears, you won't need them.

Any 'system' is only as good as the weakest link. Fuses for a power supply is one thing. In the signal path its another.

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In my view, the fuse does not harm things.

Now it may not act quick enough to protect the tweeter either.

There is a lot of traffic about the effect of resistive losses in the whole loop between the amp and the speaker. None the less, the biggest resistance is the voice coil itself. Say it is 8 ohms.

I'd think you could get the rest of the resistance up to 2 ohms (10 total) and not be able to hear it.

What are the offenders.

Very long, thin cables might do that. But if you have decent zip cord at 0.5 ohms (this is a high figure), going to 0.1 ohms with very thick wire is not going to improve things much. You're bringing down wire resistance to 0.2 of the original (seems good) but the loop overall goes from 8.5 to 8.1.

Some of inductors might have 0.5 ohms. People change over to "better" inductors with 0.1 ohms.

I.e. if you optimize things in both areas, you go from 9 ohms total to 8.2 total in the loop. That is not much.

Consider the fuse. It probably has a resistance of 0.1 ohms, to pick a number out of a hat. Really not much in the overall scheme of things.

You may be worried at the very fine wire in there. It is about an inch in length. However, there is probably 100 inches of the same sized wire in the voice coil of the tweeter. (This appoximation makes ballpark sense if there is 0.1 ohm per inch.)

This also is why tweeters can't be very well protected by fuses. The wire in both is about the same size. People quip that the tweeter blows out to protect the fuse.

I'm a bit surprize to hear people report improvement with the Zener pair removed.

There is another problem with the Zener as reported by the factory. When the circuit is over driven, the Zener pair presents a short to the amp. "Not a very nice thing to do the amp."

Why not put the Zener pair on the voice coil side of the fuse. That way, they will clamp and blow the fuse. Probably someone has done this.

For the record, the Zener diode conducts when forward biased even by a little bit. It also conducts when reverse biased at the Zener voltage. You put two in series with one reversed.

Therefore, when A.C. voltage is applied one conducts, and the other doesn't. With too much volage the "other" does and there is short in the series circuit.

Best,

Gil

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