What is your favorite low-tech tweek?


With all of this talk of expensive interconnects, the right plugs, etc., what have you done to your system that has been helpful but without shelling out tons of money?

In a differant thread I saw where I could use some foam insulation used for water pipes to wrap around my longer interconnects to keep them off the floor and seperated from other cables/wires. Also, I am using a pair of tall electrostatic speakers laying on their sides for audio. They are positioned at the base of my screen used in my home theatre. I didn't want the speakers flat on the hardwood floors, so I am using a couple month's supply of wine corks beneath the speakers for seperation. Finally, I got a bit tired looking at the cheap two-wire power cord that came with my Cd player and I re-wired a much better computer cord to a two-pronged plug and I do believe I have better results. That, or I should have made the best use of what the wine corks were designed to do stop with the crazy creative tinkering. So, what have you done along these lines?
unclejeff
I used to clean my connections regularly with a product called Cramolin. Eventually it was discontinued. (at least I couldn't find it any more) I started to think that it was possibly just the act of disconnecting and reseating the connection that made the difference in the first place. It actually does make an improvement IMO. Possibly the results are better with Ultra Connect etc., but you can't possibly get cheaper than this tweak.
Ppridday:

I believe Cramolin to be the same as another product currently/recently available, but unfortunately I forgot the brand name. It might be one of the Caig products.

When I ran out of Cramolin I used electrician's alcohol for a while (not good for gold plate I'm told) and then used Kontak (gift from a friend) until I spilled the remainder of the bottle.

Now I'm back to using electrician's alcohol (MG Chemicals) and sometimes Flitz polish on nasty vintage contacts/plugs.

Overall I liked the Kontak best (cleaned better than alcohol and never gumbed up any tube sockets), but I'm too cheap to buy a bottle.

I have wondered if dry cleaning fluid might work well (the Kontak smelled like it (dry cleaning fluid) underneath the citrus scent.

Yes, unplugging and plugging works fine (just did it to everything going into the preamp this morning as I was too lazy to actually clean all of the connections). Took me less than half a minute.
Cramolin was the pre-cursor to De-Oxit and ProGold; all by Caig Products.

I played with my ground rod once, but my mother caught me. I did clean both the rod end, plus the water pipe bond. I *know I dropped a few ohms off the ground circuit impedance, but sonically, it was a zip...
DIY polyline record sleeves -- very simple!

Having a number of records with just paper inner sleeves, buy plastic round bottom inner sleeves and insert them onto the paper sleeve making together a polyline inner record sleeve.