greg@olivej.UUCP (Greg Paley) (01/10/85)
A friend of mine, using an NAD CD player and Threshold amp managed to blow all of the fuses on his Magneplanar MG-IIIB's. Since he had a pair of rear speakers running with a separate amp and was doing other things while the player was on, he wasn't aware of exactly when it happened or even which CD was being played. In his case, this is no big deal since for $2.50 he can replace all of the fuses. I'm concerned, because the instructions for my Vandersteen IIC's specifically recommend against fusing, with the argument that it shouldn't be necessary and will inevitably cause a deterioration in the sound. I'm not about to blame the CD player outright. I suspect that, although my friend doesn't own any of the "notorious" speaker-killer disks, such as the Telarc 1812 Overture or Wellington's Victory, he probably turned it up loud enough to hear something like the soft beginning of the Mahler 1st Symphony in another room, only to be blasted by the forte sections. The situation brings up several diverse points that I think merit some discussion: (1) How much dynamic range is really desirable for a home situation? In other words, do you really want to spend your time jumping up and down, turning up the soft passages to make them audible and turning down the loud passages so as to avoid being blasted out of the room? It seems a practical limit of sorts has already been reached and, in fact, may have already been reached with analogue recordings. (2) Is there an alternative, short of "on the spot" monitoring and speaker fusing to protect equipment in this situation? (3) Perhaps the first one that should really be asked: is this a relatively exceptional occurence, indicating a defect in either the player, preamp, or amp, or is it something likely to occur fairly frequently when CD players are linked to high-end, high-powered (150+ Watts/Channel) systems in the hands of people who like their music fairly loud? My personal concern is still somewhat theoretical since I don't yet own a CD player. However, another friend gave me the surprise of my life by demonstrating his recent-model Sanyo player which, though poorly isolated from shock and requiring a real struggle to insert and remove disks from its drawer, produced sound better than I've ever heard from a CD player in its price class. I'm still not about to rush out and buy one but, to say the least, it's given me second thoughts. - Greg Paley
karn@petrus.UUCP (01/11/85)
The heart of the problem is reducing the level of ambient noise in your listening area. While I am blessed (?) with a private residence in a quiet neighborhood, there are plenty of things that start sounding very loud when you want to listen to CDs. Air conditioners, refrigerators, and most especially, personal computers with fans all contribute. I think that a major effort to reduce background noise would not only help you keep your speakers intact, it would also protect your hearing. It is very tempting to just turn the volume up to cover up the noise. Phil
sjc@angband.UUCP (Steve Correll) (01/11/85)
Speaker fuses need not degrade an audio system if one places them inside the power-amplifier feedback loop, immediately after the output transistors; I believe Heathkit used to do this. (The negative feedback used in audio amplifiers reduces not just the nonlinearity but also the output impedance. The impedance of a fuse is much less than the value of the emitter resistor used in many transistor output stages to stabilize the bias, and a fuse is probably much more nearly linear than the output transistors themselves.) I'm a little foggy with regard to tube amplifiers, but I believe the same trick might be made to work. Apropos the comment about a Sanyo CD player not being very shock-resistant, is it actually less immune than the usual turntable? -- --Steve Correll sjc@s1-c.ARPA, ...!decvax!decwrl!mordor!sjc, or ...!ucbvax!dual!mordor!sjc
greg@olivej.UUCP (Greg Paley) (01/14/85)
>> Apropos the comment about a Sanyo CD player not being very shock-resistant, >> is it actually less immune than the usual turntable? No, but that was not the relevant issue. It was considerably less immune than other CD players in its price class, which makes for a bit of a dilemma since, at least to my ears, it offered a superior sound quality to what I've heard from other comparable players. Is it greedy to want both sound quality and good isolation? This might not be a particular problem for many people who can easily avoid subjecting the unit to mechanical shock, but those who, like me, have small children in the house know that it's impossible to predict when they'll come storming through which, in the case of this particular player in my friend's installation, caused ear-splitting sputters to result. - Greg Paley
mikey@trsvax.UUCP (01/14/85)
I think fuses are worthless. First off, how many people blow their woofers because of DC offset? Most amps capable of blowing the speakers have DC sensors that will pull the speaker relay off. You're not going to protect the midrange and tweeters with a single fuse, you'd have to put individual fuses at each element, and I doubt that you could get a fuse that would act fast enough on transients (there won't be a DC offset here, unless you bi-amp or tri-amp) and not blow on loud music. The only purpose I can justify for a fuse is to prevent the output stage from doing a melt-down, not to protect the speakers. mikey at trsvax
smb@ulysses.UUCP (Steven Bellovin) (01/16/85)
I suppose I should throw in a story about how speaker fuses can help... I had a Heath AR-1500A receiver, which, through a glitch (caused by pressing on the volume control knob to seat it better) sent a large spike of pure DC down the line. Yup, the fuses went.... Moral: pure DC shouldn't happen, but then again, neither should power line shorts involving the AC line fuse.
rs55611@ihuxk.UUCP (Robert E. Schleicher) (01/18/85)
Maybe someone can comment on this, but it was my impression that with most modern tweeter designs, the common cause of failure is not a transient, but rather thermal damage from sustained high-frequency content. This is in contrast to typical woofers, in which the chief cause of damage is excess cone excursion during transients. Thus, a single fuse may well protect both the woofer and tweeter. When I bought my Advents (6 years ago), they enclosed a specific fuse recommendation that would prevent thermal damage to the tweeter (which was the weak point of Advents in their original design; mine had a ferro-fluid cooled tweeter that was more robust), and presumably protected against most woofer damage causes. Thermal damage in tweeters makes a kind of intuitive sense, as with dome tweeters, or ribbon designs, or EMIT (Infinity), there isn't really a cone to "pop out", and you're really worried about power levels, not peaks Also, many "experts" advise that the most potentially damaging music (for speaker damage) is synthesizer music, which typically has much more sustained high frequency content. Bob Schleicher ihuxk!rs55611