BTW no fuse is better than any fuse. Not safe but sounds better as you have experienced with the Maggies.
I had an eye opening experience with fuses "back in the day". My initial foray into this insanity that we call high end came in the mid-80s when I bought a pair of Dahlquist DQ-10s while on my honeymoon (yes I did say my honeymoon, but that is a story for another time....) The first amp that i used to drive the DQ-10s was a Hafler DH-220, which put out 115 WPC. The speakers had 3A fuses in them and being new to the hobby I was just as happy to have them there because I would have rather replaced the fuses that damaged the speakers. And I felt my fears were justified because I was blowing fuses on a pretty regular basis (once every 2 or 3 months) About a year later a good friend of mine bought one of the "New" Moscode 300s from Harvey Rosenberg's NY Audio Labs. One night he brought it over to my place for a test drive and I was hooked. I went in to Dave Wasserman's Stereo Exchange in NYC with full intention of buying a Moscode 300 and when i got there he had just taken a Moscode 600 in on a trade and offered it to me at a price that I just couldn't turn down. So now I had gone from a 115 WPC amp to a 300WPC amp. You would think that I now needed to be extra careful not to run the amp too hard or I would be blowing even more fuses.
Much to my surprise from the day I brought the Moscode home I never popped a single fuse. Why would this be? On the face of things it didn't seem to make sense.
Here is my opinion as to why this happened. One of the psycho-acoustic cues that tells us when something is "loud enough" is the clarity and the volume of transient peaks such as cymbal crashes (hence the concept of the loudness contour button on older receivers that boosted the frequency ranges where these peaks most often occur to make things sound "better" at low volumes.) One of the biggest advantages of a higher power amp is not so much its ability to put out large amounts of sustained power but rather the headroom it provides to cleanly reproduce transient peaks. These clean peaks actually allowed me to push both the amp and the speakers much less and still have an listening experience that did not seem to lack volume. The Hafler 220s much more limited headroom and dynamic range cause me to run the amp much harder and use more continuous RMS watts to achieve the same perceived volume, thus the more frequent fuse blow outs. I had the Moscode for 5 years before bypassing the fuses in favor of a new protection circuit designed by George Kay that protected the output by monitoring the input signal in a way that was not directly in the signal path. But in all that time I never once blew a 3A fuses in spite of being able to achieve SPLs that would drive you from the room. (And 3 amps into a 4 ohm load is only 36 watts)
Based on this experience it has become my firm belief that it is much more important to protect a speaker from an underpowered amp that is to protect it from an overpowered one.
