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Contact Enhancers

RayDunzl

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Do they work?

I don't have the tools to measure tiny changes, maybe amir does. Care to test them?

Here's someone that might, although he's apparently a vendor, so there has to be a level of suspicion...

-----------------
http://ralaudio.com/stabilant-22-contact-enhancer-m-2.html?info=stbtn024

Background
The effects of accumulations of dirt and film in connectors carrying low-level signal not only degrades the signal to noise level of the system, but should introduce significant amounts of distortion if there are conduction discontinuities with voltages caused by those dirt accumulations and films.

Hypothesis
If discontinuities in conduction and rectification effects are present then the distortion caused by them should increase as the voltage decreases; for the increased voltage will break down the particulate and film material leading to those discontinuities.

Also, if discontinuities are present in the transfer function they should show up as disproportional amount of high order harmonic distortion as the applied signal voltage is lowered.



Chart 2: Total & the 5th and lower harmonic distortion - averaged for ten new connector sets - each having 100 contact pairs. (click to enlarge)




Chart 3:As above - after exposure for a period of 31 days disconnected (with card edge contacts exposed) and 31 days connected. (click to enlarge)




Chart 4: As above - after treatment with Stabilant 22 (click to enlarge)

Conclusions


The tests demonstrate that Stabilant 22 has a significant effect in lowering the harmonic distortion in connectors. Furthermore, the tests demonstrate that the use of Stabilant 22 apparently overcomes the discontinuous conduction effects of films and particulate contaminants in connectors. The test demonstrated that this discontinuous effect produced a high proportion of high order harmonics.

Comments:
In audio systems, high order harmonic distortion is held to be much more easily distinguished, and therefore is considered much more critical than lower order harmonic distortions of the same order of magnitude. The use of the Stabilant reduced this high order distortion through the apparent mechanism of reducing the amount of what might be termed "contact rectification" which was taking place within the connection means. As noted, the ear has been found to be quite sensitive to these higher order harmonics, the subjective effect ranging from "grainy" to "glassy" depending upon the level of this distortion present in the signal. In applications such as commercial recording consoles where the signal path involves a great number of connectors. the potential for degradation of the signal is particularly high. When it is considered that the connectors employed in the test were brand new, and that the period of sixty-two days produced a significant increase in the measured distortion, the potential for this type of signal degradation on equipment that has been in use for several months to several years is very significant.

------------------


Disclaimer:
I use DeOxit gold, whose ad-copy insinuates a similar method of action - a thin polymeric film* that fills microscopic voids and becomes conductive in the presence of a voltage across the film, but it doesn't have the same "approval" factor as Stabilant-22, which has automotive and aerospace application recommendations from the manufacturers.

Ears say "no harm done, possible improvement". Can Mr Wizard do a test here at ScienceCentral? Shouldn't be too hard or expensive.

*polyoxyethylene-polyoxypropyline block polymer with a molecular weight of about 2800

http://www.bellcustomer.com/files/Storage/TB_407-08-81.pdf

http://www.rialtainfo.com/vw/vw_images/tech_bulletin_97-95-03.pdf



 
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fas42

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IME, not really. The real goal is to have a "perfect" conductive path from one electrical part to the next - you know, like a schematic implies, a nice solid line links the two nodes of the circuit. Anything which relies on two lumps of metal bumping up against each other is a very poor imitation of that solid line - read a book on the nature of such contacts, it's a nightmare world which makes one realise how hit and miss that mechanism is at the microscopic level.

Contact enhancers alter how the quality of the contact changes, and degrades with time; I spent weeks and months playing with them trying to solve the connection problem - and gave up. Only use soldering and silver particle treatments, correctly applied, now - result, no disturbing artifacts in the sound, subtle distortion that drives me crazy listening to most systems.

It always amazes me that people can't really wrap their heads around the concept of "a chain is as strong as its weakest link" - this is what's at the heart of getting optimum sound ...
 

amirm

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Boy, that is some methodology!

"
Method:
Ten 100 contact gold plated edge card connectors were wired so as to place the contacts in series when ten 100 contact gold-plated card edges were prepared in similar manner. Thus ten sets of connector-edge card pairs were available for testing

Using a load resistance of 600 ohms, and a test frequency of 1 kHz, a distortion analyzer coupled to a spectrum analyzer was used, under computer control, it measure as many harmonics as could be extracted from the noise floor.

The connector distortion was measured when the units were new. Then they were uncoupled and suspended connected down from hooks under a plywood shield (to protect them from falling material), which allowed air and contaminants to circulate freely about the exposed units. They were left thus exposed for a period of 31 days in a shop which could be considered as typical of a small electronics production plant. The edge cards were then inserted into the connectors and the assembled units left for another 31 days.

They were removed and their distortion contribution measured using the identical set up as before.

The cards themselves were removed from the connectors and both faces received small bead of undiluted Stabilant along their edge. This was wiped lightly over the connector with a sable brush also saturated with the Stabilant 22 so that there was no significant scrubbing action. They were reconnected and their distortion contribution measured as before.

The connectors were unplugged and exposed for another 31 days, reconnected and exposed for an additional 31 days and measured again."

A month of being exposed and a month of use after?

I don't know how one makes sure all connectors are treated the same mechanically other than some statistical sampling.
 

fas42

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The most disturbing aspect to all these mechanisms is that the behaviour is not invariant with time - the quality of a simplistic connection is constantly altering because the corrosion action is dynamic, depending upon everything. For me, this is one of the key ingredients of audiophile "burn-in" - the virgin connection steadily builds up a level of contamination, until the audible effect doesn't alter any more - the final state is a balance of the "good", and "bad" stuff. Only by having high integrity connections throughout the system can one actually get the benefit of what the combination of components is intrinsically capable of.
 

NorthSky

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Cosmik

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IME, not really. The real goal is to have a "perfect" conductive path from one electrical part to the next - you know, like a schematic implies, a nice solid line links the two nodes of the circuit. Anything which relies on two lumps of metal bumping up against each other is a very poor imitation of that solid line - read a book on the nature of such contacts, it's a nightmare world which makes one realise how hit and miss that mechanism is at the microscopic level.

Contact enhancers alter how the quality of the contact changes, and degrades with time; I spent weeks and months playing with them trying to solve the connection problem - and gave up. Only use soldering and silver particle treatments, correctly applied, now - result, no disturbing artifacts in the sound, subtle distortion that drives me crazy listening to most systems.

It always amazes me that people can't really wrap their heads around the concept of "a chain is as strong as its weakest link" - this is what's at the heart of getting optimum sound ...
As always, though, there's the awkward issue of the hundreds of such nightmare contacts throughout the whole recording chain. Somehow these don't produce any disturbing artifacts for you, but that final couple of contacts in your own system are what you notice...
 

Blumlein 88

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Various XLR makers spec resistance of the connections as 50 milli-ohms or less. Some 20 or 10 milli-ohms or less. For feeding a device with 10kohm or more input impedance the contact resistance is rather minor at best. Should contact resistance vary by some small fraction of the few dozen milli-ohms it isn't a enough to amount to anything to worry about.

What would the degradation be if left plugged in for a year? Probably not much of anything where the contact is made. Even if so at a truly tiny level, then well and good. Go unplug and replug your wires once or twice a year.

On another forum I posted files of an RCA cable that was said to be directional. I hooked it up for a bit over one day and then after recording reversed directions to record again. Someone said they sounded different and believed it was because of contact corroding. Seriously? WTF!!!! Fortunately as well as recording music I recorded some basic measurements. SNR was different by less than .5 db. Distortion was different by even less than that at less than -110 db. I am pretty sure no difference was due to corrosion over a bit more than one day. Where do these people get these goofy as crap ideas? GEEZUS!
 

Cosmik

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Various XLR makers spec resistance of the connections as 50 milli-ohms or less. Some 20 or 10 milli-ohms or less. For feeding a device with 10kohm or more input impedance the contact resistance is rather minor at best. Should contact resistance vary by some small fraction of the few dozen milli-ohms it isn't a enough to amount to anything to worry about.

What would the degradation be if left plugged in for a year? Probably not much of anything where the contact is made. Even if so at a truly tiny level, then well and good. Go unplug and replug your wires once or twice a year.

On another forum I posted files of an RCA cable that was said to be directional. I hooked it up for a bit over one day and then after recording reversed directions to record again. Someone said they sounded different and believed it was because of contact corroding. Seriously? WTF!!!! Fortunately as well as recording music I recorded some basic measurements. SNR was different by less than .5 db. Distortion was different by even less than that at less than -110 db. I am pretty sure no difference was due to corrosion over a bit more than one day. Where do these people get these goofy as crap ideas? GEEZUS!
I think the point is (or would be if I was trying to sell a product using FUD) that a resistance figure doesn't tell you how the contamination behaves at very low voltages. A barrier requiring 5 mV to cross it may not show up in a resistance measurement but would mess up a low level audio signal in a way similar to crossover distortion - is that the idea? My intuition is that in a huge connector like a phono, there are so many effectively gas-tight points of metal-to-metal contact, and the currents so low, that the contaminated barriers look like open circuits in parallel with very low resistance shorts. So I'm not worried.
 

fas42

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As always, though, there's the awkward issue of the hundreds of such nightmare contacts throughout the whole recording chain. Somehow these don't produce any disturbing artifacts for you, but that final couple of contacts in your own system are what you notice...
Of course they produce artifacts, which adds a certain quality to the recording. But they're locked in, set in concrete, they will never alter in nature - but the contacts on my side can be fiddled with, they are a dynamic in the equation. Of course, if I just allow them to degenerate to a general, stable mediocrity that means I won't notice this variance - but now my system produces rather crappy sound, which irritates me a lot - so I don't bother listening to it that much ...

From trial and error, fixing this stuff on my end makes all the difference - I'm chasing convincing sound, and I can guarantee I will never succeed unless I takes this extra care.
 

Cosmik

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Of course they produce artifacts, which adds a certain quality to the recording. But they're locked in, set in concrete, they will never alter in nature - but the contacts on my side can be fiddled with, they are a dynamic in the equation. Of course, if I just allow them to degenerate to a general, stable mediocrity that means I won't notice this variance - but now my system produces rather crappy sound, which irritates me a lot - so I don't bother listening to it that much ...

From trial and error, fixing this stuff on my end makes all the difference - I'm chasing convincing sound, and I can guarantee I will never succeed unless I takes this extra care.
So, assuming that your system has a couple of dodgy contacts and the recording studio had ninety eight, by fiddling you are transforming the sound from 100% crappy to 98% crappy?

(the 98% being set in concrete of course)
 

fas42

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My intuition is that in a huge connector like a phono, there are so many effectively gas-tight points of metal-to-metal contact, and the currents so low, that the contaminated barriers look like open circuits in parallel with very low resistance shorts. So I'm not worried.
Gas tight? Don't make me laugh! The point is that the resistance may be small, but it is also extremely non-linear, chaotic in behaviour - a large, but perfectly stable resistance is infinitely preferable to a small one that varies greatly, depending upon everything. MOSFET switches used in audio are all about the linearity of the resistance curve, not the absolute resistance ...

For whatever reasons, the contacts can degrade very, very quickly - a friend has an amplifier using the famous Alps blue volume pot; I noted the quality degrading while listening - it turned out the control was used in a narrow arc most of the time, refreshing the contact point in this region restored the quality, only to steadily go downhill again. Using the volume pot in a relatively virgin part of the path it was not possible to pick anything. Solution ... throw out the pot, replace with a new one ...
 

fas42

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So, assuming that your system has a couple of dodgy contacts and the recording studio had ninety eight, by fiddling you are transforming the sound from 100% crappy to 98% crappy?

(the 98% being set in concrete of course)
It's not a simple arithmetic game; a certain level of competence of the whole is necessary to get 'special' sound happening, and the smartest thing is not to leave obvious weaknesses as part of the package. From experience, every weakness missed lessens the chance of getting to a sufficient quality, and the rig can hover and skate between ordinary and special in frustrating cycles because not enough has been to done to address these issues.
 

Cosmik

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The point is that the resistance may be small, but it is also extremely non-linear, chaotic in behaviour - a large, but perfectly stable resistance is infinitely preferable to a small one that varies greatly, depending upon everything. MOSFET switches used in audio are all about the linearity of the resistance curve, not the absolute resistance ...
Thank you for reiterating what I said in my post. I described it as a voltage-dependent "barrier" that would produce an effect akin to crossover distortion, but your description is OK, too.

Edit: perhaps not. Your description worries about a small resistance that is nonlinear. So in a bad case it might, say, "vary greatly" between 1 nano-ohm and 1 micro-ohm - a ratio of one thousand to one! In fact, that is not actually a problem at any signal voltage as long as the load impedance is very high in comparison. What does matter is if there is a genuinely high resistance at low voltages. As long as there is some metal-to-metal contact in a few places, there cannot be such a high resistance - we are dealing with tiny currents so we only need a tiny area of genuine contact to achieve a suitably low resistance at any voltage.
 
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Thomas savage

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So, assuming that your system has a couple of dodgy contacts and the recording studio had ninety eight, by fiddling you are transforming the sound from 100% crappy to 98% crappy?

(the 98% being set in concrete of course)
Behold, Cosmik math...
 

iridium

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Do they work?

I don't have the tools to measure tiny changes, maybe amir does. Care to test them?

Here's someone that might, although he's apparently a vendor, so there has to be a level of suspicion...

-----------------
http://ralaudio.com/stabilant-22-contact-enhancer-m-2.html?info=stbtn024

Background
The effects of accumulations of dirt and film in connectors carrying low-level signal not only degrades the signal to noise level of the system, but should introduce significant amounts of distortion if there are conduction discontinuities with voltages caused by those dirt accumulations and films.

Hypothesis
If discontinuities in conduction and rectification effects are present then the distortion caused by them should increase as the voltage decreases; for the increased voltage will break down the particulate and film material leading to those discontinuities.

Also, if discontinuities are present in the transfer function they should show up as disproportional amount of high order harmonic distortion as the applied signal voltage is lowered.



Chart 2: Total & the 5th and lower harmonic distortion - averaged for ten new connector sets - each having 100 contact pairs. (click to enlarge)




Chart 3:As above - after exposure for a period of 31 days disconnected (with card edge contacts exposed) and 31 days connected. (click to enlarge)




Chart 4: As above - after treatment with Stabilant 22 (click to enlarge)

Conclusions


The tests demonstrate that Stabilant 22 has a significant effect in lowering the harmonic distortion in connectors. Furthermore, the tests demonstrate that the use of Stabilant 22 apparently overcomes the discontinuous conduction effects of films and particulate contaminants in connectors. The test demonstrated that this discontinuous effect produced a high proportion of high order harmonics.

Comments:
In audio systems, high order harmonic distortion is held to be much more easily distinguished, and therefore is considered much more critical than lower order harmonic distortions of the same order of magnitude. The use of the Stabilant reduced this high order distortion through the apparent mechanism of reducing the amount of what might be termed "contact rectification" which was taking place within the connection means. As noted, the ear has been found to be quite sensitive to these higher order harmonics, the subjective effect ranging from "grainy" to "glassy" depending upon the level of this distortion present in the signal. In applications such as commercial recording consoles where the signal path involves a great number of connectors. the potential for degradation of the signal is particularly high. When it is considered that the connectors employed in the test were brand new, and that the period of sixty-two days produced a significant increase in the measured distortion, the potential for this type of signal degradation on equipment that has been in use for several months to several years is very significant.

------------------


Disclaimer:
I use DeOxit gold, whose ad-copy insinuates a similar method of action - a thin polymeric film* that fills microscopic voids and becomes conductive in the presence of a voltage across the film, but it doesn't have the same "approval" factor as Stabilant-22, which has automotive and aerospace application recommendations from the manufacturers.

Ears say "no harm done, possible improvement". Can Mr Wizard do a test here at ScienceCentral? Shouldn't be too hard or expensive.

*polyoxyethylene-polyoxypropyline block polymer with a molecular weight of about 2800

http://www.bellcustomer.com/files/Storage/TB_407-08-81.pdf

http://www.rialtainfo.com/vw/vw_images/tech_bulletin_97-95-03.pdf


Ray, you started an excellent thread.
iridium.
 

Sal1950

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With RCA style termination I've found the contact tension to very so badly as to be a issue.
I have some inexpensive KabelDirekt Pro's who's outer fingers are very thin and provide minimal contact pressure. I tension'd them manually bending in the flaps with needle nose but the first plugin negates that. Had a couple channels literally fall out after bit of time due to poor connection. All of them going in the garbage after replacements are acquired.
On the other hand I have some older Monster THX cables who's fingers are so thick and tight fitting I actually loosened them a bit for fear they were going to twist the the chassis mounts loose and break the inside connection during insertion or removal.
The unknown is always the contact tension on the male center connector as the feel of the outer fingers overwhelms the inner.
With proper fitting cables I'm sure a bit of Stabilant 22 sure can't hurt. Anyone want to split a kit? ;)
 
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fas42

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Edit: perhaps not. Your description worries about a small resistance that is nonlinear. So in a bad case it might, say, "vary greatly" between 1 nano-ohm and 1 micro-ohm - a ratio of one thousand to one! In fact, that is not actually a problem at any signal voltage as long as the load impedance is very high in comparison. What does matter is if there is a genuinely high resistance at low voltages. As long as there is some metal-to-metal contact in a few places, there cannot be such a high resistance - we are dealing with tiny currents so we only need a tiny area of genuine contact to achieve a suitably low resistance at any voltage.
Again, I can hear the problems! And did so 30 years ago! It drove me nuts for weeks, months trying to find a satisfactory solution - the precise nature of what's going on I'll leave to those with the equipment to inspect and measure the behaviour, what matters here is resolving the issue, once and for all. At the time, soldering gave me that, so I still go for this approach - then, I came across the various silver paints and pastes, tried those, and am happy with their performance, when very carefully used.

As Sal mentions, RCA is a nightmare, and the sockets can be appalling quality. I always bypass these entirely, which always gives me a major jump up in quality, straight off the bat. Stabilant and their equivalents seem to work, but after a while there is a quality to the sound which doesn't feel right - pull the connection, clean all the enhancer off, plug back in - ahhh! that's better! ...
 

Cosmik

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There sure is a lot for audiophiles to worry about! I can't help but think that it's a slightly unhealthy obsession. One thing though: by going entirely digital and solid state, a lot of these contacts are eliminated. Presumably the worst of all would be the ones that connect to the phono cartridge with its tiny voltages. There would also be some pretty dodgy contacts in a valve amp I imagine.
 

Sal1950

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There sure is a lot for audiophiles to worry about! I can't help but think that it's a slightly unhealthy obsession. One thing though: by going entirely digital and solid state, a lot of these contacts are eliminated. Presumably the worst of all would be the ones that connect to the phono cartridge with its tiny voltages. There would also be some pretty dodgy contacts in a valve amp I imagine.
I remember using a product, (Tweak I think) on all the pins of my VTL monoblocks besides the cables, etc. And also on the Dynaco ST70 that powered the speakers in my shop system
Think I stopped using it when I ran out and couldn't find it any more, or I was just too cheap to replenish. LOL
 

fas42

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There sure is a lot for audiophiles to worry about! I can't help but think that it's a slightly unhealthy obsession. One thing though: by going entirely digital and solid state, a lot of these contacts are eliminated. Presumably the worst of all would be the ones that connect to the phono cartridge with its tiny voltages. There would also be some pretty dodgy contacts in a valve amp I imagine.

I agree with you - simplicity is key, and complete integration is the smartest approach. Something like the Kii Three, driven by digital source signal only, would be ideal - and a competent implementation should have no trouble producing superb sound.
 
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