Walker SST contact enhancer
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/ |
Rushton, Thanks for the info. As I said, I don't know anything about this stuff and am curious. Do you believe in the Nexgen and Eichmann theory? FWIW - I used the Mapleshade contact enhancer (similar to SST) and found that it created more problems and a bigger mess than it was worth. After plugging and unplugging the ICs a couple of times, the paste ended up getting everywhere as well as holding any dirt it may have come in contact with. My result was noise due to a tiny contact on one of my RCAs. Very difficult to diagnose since it kept changing as I tried to narrow it down to a single component by changing interconnects and the paste kept exchanging itself with ICs and smearing on the RCA. Only a slight film of paste was used too. It took hours to diagnose, then hours to clean-up too. But, maybe it would be good on the breaker...where I'll never have to see it again. Dave |
Hi Dave, I think the philosophy of reducing the amount of metal in a connector has some solid theoretical foundation (as best I can understand it since I'm just a lay person), and I think the theory is being substantiated in some applications (for example, 47Labs has been doing this in their designs for years). As to the Mapleshade Silclear, I think you'd have a different and more positive experience with the Walker Audio SST and Extreme SST. It also is highly conductive so you have to be careful with it as well, but it does not migrate (even under high heat) and it dries to a soft texture rather than remaining a paste. This makes it much more resistent to going places you would never want it to travel. Some people have noted a concern about the dried SST flaking, so again there is still room for good caution. In my system, I found the Extreme SST to make such a significant positive improvement that I consider it a necessary part of my system setup, with all the appropriate considerations for use duly noted. . |
