Walker SST contact enhancer

Going to far ! Think about the air gap between the wire and the lug of the breaker. Yes it is ever so small, but the current has to jump from one to the other. Think of your current as a steady stream of water, or your current at the bottom of a waterfall, jumping, churning ect. I would pefer the steady stream as to preserve the current to the purest form from the start. Yes I understand what is being feed into my breaker box isn't to pure to start with, which is somewhat out of my control. But if I can improve, or preserve it to be its best, which is in my control, why not. Sometimes the little things make a big diffrents. Thanks, Brian

Than what's up with the Eichmann plugs and the new WTB RCA's. They go for a very small contact area.

BTW - I am not being antagonistic. I know nothing about this stuff and am curious.

Dave

Dave, as I understand the theory behind the Eichmann plugs and the new WTB RCAs, it's about reducing the amount of metal (and dielectric) in the connection more than reducing the contact area per se. There's a discussion of the design philosophy in a an article in Issue 71 of UHF Magazine.

I haven't looked at your link yet, but how does that differ from what is being done by people using this stuff at the breaker box?

Is it because a lot of current can be asked for at the power connections whereas that is not the case for signal wires (spcifically ICs)?

I'm sorry, Dave. Your question lost me. The point of the small contact on the Eichmann and new WBT plugs is to reduce the amount of metal in the connectors, not simply reduce the surface area of the point of contact. It's the mass of metal they're trying to reduce, not the surface area per se.

As to using a contact enhancer, anytime there is a connection point, the electrical current has to make a jump across a physical junction: there will always be some amount of resistance and some amount of interference. Lloyd Walker talks about this from his experience with fine tuning control systems in nuclear power plants and chemical plants: wherever there is a connection, you can see on a scope the spike of spurious energy created at that junction point. That spurious energy is going somewhere, often as some form of distortion feedback back into the system. The contact enhancer will help reduce that, whether at the low signal level of an interconnect, or the higher power level of a circuit breaker in your junction box. From an article about Lloyd by Srajan Ebaen published at EnjoyTheMusic.com:

"One of his standard test procedures of the day involved the use of time domain reflectometers to test the integrity of critical wiring, say to the core of a nuclear reactor. Despite super-expensive connectors in the $1-3K per range that make our audiophile WBT jewelry look like candy box treats, Walker recalls that each such juncture and connection still caused very obvious signal spikes and noise reflections on his test gear. This constituted but one of many hands-on insights that would later find expression in his audio design work even though not all phenomena in the industrial arena translate directly into ours." http://www.enjoythemusic.com/magazine/earwax/1201/