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!
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