Popular Post jiminlogansquare Posted March 30, 2021 Popular Post Share Posted March 30, 2021 3 hours ago, Apmusson said: I've no idea how it works or why it changes. I can't justify any of it. I do know that if I don't like it I will remove it. I'd love to know what it is doing. This has been my understanding and experience in general with Synergistic Research products. Lengthy discussion below, but the tl;dr version is that you might conclude the SR fuse, like some other SR equipment I have used, is a *change* but not really an *improvement* you want in the long term (and as usual, YMMV). A basic premise here is that SR has a house sound, or impact on sound, that it tries to achieve with many of its products (not all of them). I think from my own experience and reading that of others who have heard or owned SR soundstage enhancers that the word "holographic" used above is a good description of the house sound SR wants to create. I have an SR orange fuse that was installed by the manufacturer in the Sonore power supply for my opticalRendu, so I can't truly evaluate its impact (because I can't remove/replace/compare to another fuse for that device).However, I don't think that its presence in the power supply of the oR is having any effect on the soundstage, at least nothing like what I am about to describe. Put an SR orange fuse in another piece of equipment elsewhere in the chain, and it well could have this effect. In addition to my passive ownership/use of the orange fuse noted above, I also have used an SR soundstage enhancing gizmo called a Tranquility Pod, that for reasons I can't explain or understand *did* have a "holographic" effect on the soundstage. Another way of describing it would be to say it pushed the sound stage forward and upward, like the soundstage was contained in a balloon, and the SR device added air to further inflate the balloon. Interestingly, when I first used the SR gizmo, it had exactly the opposite effect, collapsing the soundstage as if the air had been let out of the balloon. The sales person told me to reverse the polarity of the AC plug (unplug it, rotate it 180 degrees and plug it back in the other way), and that is when the soundstage expansion effect truly kicked in. This experience was all the proof I needed that the Tranquility Pod did *something* identifiable and repeatable (otherwise unwittingly plugging it in wrong wouldn't have had a noticeably deleterious effect, one I did not anticipate nor could have, as nobody warned me about it).* Anyway, that SR product continued to have its holographic, balloon-inflating effect on my system's soundstage for as long as I continued using it. Eventually however I tired of the effect, or at least thought I might be tiring of it, and so experimented by taking it out of the system and returning it on alternate days for a week or so. At the end of the period of experimentation, I concluded that I didn't prefer the SR's impact on the soundstage and found it somewhat distracting and artificial sounding, if also seductive. The enveloping nature of the expanded soundstage was an initially pleasant sensation that eventually lost its novelty and came to seem like a *change* but not an *improvement* and so out it went.** * SR is known as a marketer of "woo" who are truly opaque in how they discuss the designs and internal workings of their products, which makes buying them an act of faith and *using them* sometimes a guessing game. Maybe they are protecting trade secrets, and I can't complain about that. But they really don't provide adequate product documentation or user manuals, up to and including the obvious benefit of simply indicating which way to plug in an AC transformer with an arrow on the plug, or a picture in the manual. (This is an unpolarized US 120V AC plug, which can go into an outlet with the blades in either of two 180-degree rotational positions.) ** The SR Tranquillity Pod now resides on a shelf in my listening room 12 feet from my stereo, where unplugged from AC in any polarity it is silently having no discernible effect on the soundstage. Make me an offer. Apmusson, R1200CL and charlesphoto 2 1 Link to comment
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