Is cartridge Demagnetizing Necessary?


Benn awhile since I posted.  Hope you all are well during this crazy time.
Have a question.  Is cartridge demagnetizing necessary and/or does it actually yield sonic results.?  Also. I read that by playing a record and at the same time shorting the RCA tonearm cable plugs together will be just as effective as using an actual demagnetizer.  Is this true?
Thanks all for your responses.
frepec
What happened with me, came to realize the improvement is definitely there. Not real huge or obvious but there. Then it gets worse, but very gradually and so slowly its hard to notice. There is for example a bigger difference between just turned on cold and hour later warmed up. Only instead of an hour its a week to a month getting magnetized.

Well this being the case it stands to reason if you only demag once in a while then you are going to be listening almost all the time to a dirty grungy system. So what I do, burn a disc with just the demag tracks and they repeat over and over again about a dozen times. This way, turn the amp on, hit play, go off do something else for half an hour by which time the system is nice and warm and demagnetized and ready to go.

You’re not fooling anyone by the way. Your system sounds so incredible because of the gate and mats and gray goo slathered all over the place. Which I know because, same here. Heh.
Not only is it not necessary, there are those that recommend against the practice as something that slowly damages the cartridge.  For example, A.J. Vandenhul (cartridge designer and manufacturer) is generally against the practice.  If you go to the Vandenhul website and go to the FAQ section, question 20 discusses the use of demagnefiers.  There are other cartridge designers who have voice some concerns, such as as Jonathan Carr of Lyra.
  • "You’re not fooling anyone by the way. Your system sounds so incredible because of the gate and mats and gray goo slathered all over the place. Which I know because, same here. Heh."


Correcto Mundo, Mi Amigo. For those who didn't get on that train, too bad for you. :-)

Frank
Just don’t demagnetize a moving magnet cartridge, or you will have no magnet and no cartridge. The rest of it is up to you. I would never use a demagnetizer per se. I occasionally use the tracks on the Cardas test record which are specifically for demagnetizing.

Ironically, there is a business centered around routing the audio signal thru cables surrounded by powerful magnets. Go figure.