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Major Improvement!
For quite some time now I have been very unhappy with the sound of my stereo
system which consists primarily of Bryston components. Today I had the idea to clean all of the male ends of my balanced XLR interconnect cables and the Bryston male balanced XLR inputs, which I proceeded to do with cotton buds and 99% isopropyl alcohol. The results are amazing, and with indeed very little effort, I believe that I reclaimed the original excellent sound of my stereo system. I am somewhat perplexed by these results since the ends of all of my balanced XLR cables are gold plated and I believe the Bryston balanced XLR input jacks likewise. It seems to me that a gold to gold connection should not deteriorate, and hence I wonder what is going on here? I also wonder how often the above described cleaning should be necessary in order to maintain top-notch sound? Perhaps others have had similar experiences and results? |
#2
Posted to rec.audio.high-end
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Major Improvement!
In article ,
"Peter" wrote: For quite some time now I have been very unhappy with the sound of my stereo system which consists primarily of Bryston components. Today I had the idea to clean all of the male ends of my balanced XLR interconnect cables and the Bryston male balanced XLR inputs, which I proceeded to do with cotton buds and 99% isopropyl alcohol. The results are amazing, and with indeed very little effort, I believe that I reclaimed the original excellent sound of my stereo system. I am somewhat perplexed by these results since the ends of all of my balanced XLR cables are gold plated and I believe the Bryston balanced XLR input jacks likewise. It seems to me that a gold to gold connection should not deteriorate, and hence I wonder what is going on here? I also wonder how often the above described cleaning should be necessary in order to maintain top-notch sound? Perhaps others have had similar experiences and results? Have you ever heard of expectational bias? Thinking that all that work (cleaning XLR contacts - six per channel per connection) should result in a positive outcome, your subconscious provided it. This is an old story, believe me and is the same mechanism that is at work when one swaps out an old cable for a new, expensive one. Our cable swapper is thinking that as much as this cable costs, it had BETTER be a sonic improvement over the cable he just replaced and voila! When he turns on his system, magically, everything sounds much better. The cable is a miracle! Our swapper then takes his costly new cable to a double blind cable test at a local audiophile club meet, and offers it up for test. But, in the test, no one, not even the cable's owner, can tell any difference between the two cables being switched in the double-blind test! Even though one cable costs many hundreds of of dollars and the other is a "throw-away" cable that often comes packed with mid-fi and video components, no one can hear the slightest difference when they can't see, and therefore don't know which cable that they are listening to at any given moment. Truth is that your balanced, XLR connections on your Bryston components are gold plated and if your cables' XLR plugs also have gold plated pins, and if the connections have been mated all this time, they have been a pretty gas-tight set of connections. Since gold doesn't tarnish or corrode and since no dirt or airborne contaminates could possibly get into your connections, they are unchanged from the day you mated those connections originally and cleaning the connections could have NO real effect on the integrity of those connections. They would be as good today as they were the day you made them and that makes it very unlikely that all that cleaning could make ANY sonic difference to your system. Most likely, your growing dissatisfaction with your system's sound was as imaginary as the cure. But if the task of cleaning your XLR connections makes you like your system again, Bravo! --- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: --- |
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