If..........

........you have a spare half hour this weekend and some wire wool or duraglit type stuff may i recomend you clean the contacts on your plug and give the ends of your fuses a rub until you can see the copper instead of plating (think youll need wire wool to get the best of the plating on the fuses) - i also buffed up the RCA outlet on my cdp a , a cheap white metal thing......

I did the above last monday, pretty much convinced it was a pointless exercise - indeed i only did it cos i had to strip the system down so i could get some internal shots of my CDP, and there was wire wool to hand from cleaning the glass on the woodburner...

Results - already said i was sceptical about this so, would i be typing this if it hadn't made a difference - i dont think so! is it a night and day change, dunno how that is defined, suffices to say i really cannot deny there have been changes across the board from the highs to the lows - only thing is the bass now seems slower but i think that maybe because bass is more defined now (as opposed to being more of it) and its simply really showing up my already known issue with speaker placement - and negotiations ref bass traps are already under way with the future Mrs1968....

Thanks to Zanash for his CDP tweaks thread and offline conversations about tweaking..... i'l be pursuing more tweaks in the future....

Only problem is i wont be around to listen somemore this weekend we're now off to Wales for a long weekend - 6 of us in an old castle, no TV etc etc - just ourselves a real fire, good food and good wine for company. I know, itll be tough....

 

Were the contacts particularly dirty? Hmm…

 

I'm blushing.... thanks!

I use a dremel with a very fine abrasive on the pins , then an ultra fine diamond polishing file/tool thingy meant for sharpening knves and finally duraglitt wadding. Fuses come upwell with just the wadding, it always supprises me the dfference this can make to the sound.

 

dirty - mm dunno how 'dirty' is measured but a quick A - B comparisson at the time of cleaning showed the cleaned pins were indeed much shinier than the uncleaned ones.....

For all i know this could well be all in the mind but hey, i am typically sceptical about these things and this 'upgrasde ws for free...so i have not laid out good money, such that i need to justify it to myself by (potentially) making up the improvemnts in my head.........

and besides - this got me thinking - surely equipment is (well, should be) designed / built around getting the clearest possible retreival and transmission of data which is an electrical signal?
DIY threads elsewehre show that changing some components for 'upgrade' varients, even inso called 'High End' kit, does yield improvements (though i dont know personally -not tried it. Yet...) so why cannot having cleaner contacts yield a benefit....

just my 2penorth...

 

When you look at a three pin plug pins if they are dull it means that there is a layer of oxide on the surface[ or sulphide]. Even a shiney pin will show some discolouration of dura glit wadding, so what I'm saying is you can never get them totally cleaned. Once cleaned I normally deoxite and the protect them with progold both from Craig. This gives reasonable protection for 6months or so.