Can an Ethernet filter improve sound?

[W9TR]

All great points.

I always wonder about the people playing Russian-Roulette with the cheap chi-fi tube amps they are buying.

I bet many of them have zero kind of safety rating or testing done.

I’ll use the Topping L30 headphone amp as an example. Poor design and no testing resulted in static discharge causing the amplifier to fail, driving the output to one of the supply rails. This in turn caused connected low impedance headphones to fail. I imagine it was quite loud, too. The Topping designers blamed the customers and refused to pay for the damaged headphones. Eventually they relented, don’t know if anyone got paid for damaged headphones but the units were eventually repaired under warranty.

Normal consumer product testing requires the product to survive and operate through multiple 18 kV static strikes, + and - polarity on all vulnerable part of the product - displays, switches, input terminals, power supply, etc. The Topping designers had no clue. Do you think they run power input testing and safety testing? Highly unlikely.

This is why I buy UL Certified products.

 

[mep]

I'm an Electrical Engineer. Products I've designed are in millions of homes worldwide. For stereo gear, I use medical grade linear power supplies that are UL, ETL, or CSA Listed. Then I add regulators and isolation of my own design to the output of the certified power supply. This maintains agency certification while allowing me to experiment.

In the United States, federal law does not universally require UL Certification for every product. Local authorities often do, and most insurance companies require you to use UL/ETL/CSA certified electrical appliances.

A word on magic fuses - irrespective of their real or imagined sonic benefits, it is unlikely that they were manufactured in a UL certified facility to any UL, CSA, or ETL standards. I have searched the UL database on: HiFi-Tuning, Acme, Isoclean, and Synergistic Research and found no fuse listings. Nada. That doesn't mean they don't exist; I just haven't found them.

"Fuses are safety devices and should be purchased from established industry players like Littlefuse and Bussman."

Exactly my thoughts.