Please help SBAF USERS..Deoxit and other good Rig maintainace the inside story..

Right then...The last part of the kit cleaning extravaganza.
Recap...IPA for dust grease some contaminants.
Caig Deoxit for oxidisation other surface contamination.

Contact Z meant to be Aerospace contact cleaner. Could be re potted KONTACT?
Doesn't smell like MEK / trichloroethylene or other thinners I've used. It was £6 so what the hell..
The ESD foam sticks were great.. They are for cleaning Fine pitch ASICS FPGA'S.
Small and large bag of mixed..

1 thing I did as I was disassembling and re assembling my OPPO HA1 I put a bit of Deoxit gold on the screw threads. The Rough self tappers can be terrible for cross threading... the oil in deoxit helps...

I had tryed the Mapleshade Cilclear silver contact grease on the audio USBcables and power Cables. I went OTT on the 3 pin UK plug.. A line on the outside plug caused a short and tripped the house RCD....
So a good lesson learned be careful when using as near to using liquid metal. That was with the tiny brush supplied...

Right then the meat and potatoes. ...

Stripped off the case , plugged in and power off... An ESD coat two straps and an ESD bag to put the DAC board in.....

Remember this is me seeing how far you can go with this for what can be achieved.
On a tight budget but can be applied to any connection inside or out....

Before I did IPA and red deoxit.
Then re did it with the less harsh gold.
I would have used the Cilclear earlier but hadn't arrived... 3 weeks in..
I removed the Dac board and connectors.+ 2 Standoff pillars. There are 2 multi wire connectors under there from the front volume pot /screen and one from the rear input connections. They I found are too small to solder with my home kit on the female crimps wires. And not worth the risk.
But they had been sat there flooded with Deoxit gold...
The male.PCB side pins are tiny just a few mm across so I had to Mod an ESD stick to get in and wipe over with IPA to remove the old Deoxit..

The female plastic clips with the wire bundles, I just dipped in a small glass of IPA and blew out with an air duster can. There was some copper oxide inside taken off by the deoxit. Rinse and repeat. Then a go of the contact Z stuff for good measure...

The pins are really small with not much of a gap. The CILCLEAR can cause shorts easy so I used a sowing needle cleaned to apply it and control the amount. That small is like playing ' Operation' but a steady hand...

I dipped the pin and applied only half way down , using the surface tension to apply it all the way around...

Shorts would happen if it pools at the bottom so less is more...

The Toroidal transformer connectors are much larger and easier to get in and clean the pins.. The IPA bath worked nice again to remove the old deoxit blow out and repeat.

I soldered the top wires to the female crimps before... but again the be anal used that contact Z stuff. It evaporated fast so a loaded esd foam stick worked and final blow out..

This was easier to apply the Cilclear but same again... A sowing needle only half way down the PCB Pins. Check for potential shorts and refit.
The DAC board has 3 flexible films so other than a clean and gold Deoxit. ..

The 3 push fits got the same clean and Cilclear..

A Note I found that because I trained in soldering working on the shop floor I did notice the PCB wasn't that clean.. I flooded the PCB and gave it a wash and scrub with the ESD large sticks and blew out under ICs.
That got the remains flux residue off.

The real final OCD was removing the 5 Bonding point screws and cleaning with a small wire brush in the IPA bath. A glass desert dish.. The same for the aluminum chassis holes as best as.... A lot of crap came out... A touch of cilclear between washers pcb and threads for total contact.
Same for the main Earth tab washer.

Experiment over, not a half assed job but the best I could do with what I had...
ESD safe and electrical safe as best as...

Re assembled and turned on... It blow up and killed the house electrics...

No... It did click a couple of times that made me shat one...
But all is good in the OPPO ha1 hood..

I have been told this type of grease can improve as it settles in.

Regardless of your opinion, hard soldering wins but can't always be done and contact resistance comes in many forms...

My take on this has been to remove oxidisation..flux does this before soldering.
The deoxit has taken this role and removed a lot of contact issues.
you need a clean joint to solder.
The.Cilclear acts as the solder on the contact faces of the wire clips. They are a few mm wide touching at one point..

Just using the Deoxit blew me away on what I had before IMHO...
Pushing what's possible as a maintainace come tweak...
What has the CILCLEAR done extra?
6-7 hours on this run..

It has worked not as the initial jump from dirty to deoxit.
Cilclear on cleaned joints has worked to a positive result in what I hear. Or as Thad E might say as different...

Cleaner sounding more detail, Bass and percussion. Voices make me jump a little and sounds that weren't there are now..

A lot of work just to disprove a guy from work at the start. Conversations with knowledgeable people, lessons learned and some new skills...

No real modding of components. Just a bit of soldering but I have that skill with 10 years practice.
Deoxit requires little skill and is very cheap.
A litre of 100/99 IPA is cheaper. Great for glasses and cleaning phone screens.

Good tweezers gloves...Nitrile gloves don't fall apart.. A cheap ESD coat and strap.

The kit can burn, break or explode... as long as you are safe that's all that matters...
Power, chemicals that's no 1 in industry safety first and last always....

Go buy fancy cables pre and post your equipment... but there is a big potential for doing the inside as well as outside.
How much is like a piece of string depends on many factors...
If there is any better advice or products let me know. Cost was the main factor to start getting people interested.

From a pole of 12 we at least now with a low degree of certainty. .... People don't mess that much or haven't considered it.

I think it does and for $30 to $60 can beat any cable or add on.

All this has done is make my kit work to its full potential...

My OPPO is fantastic to my ears from before and is now staying..
What can this do for your kit... Follow the advice but only you can see if it was worth the effort....
If this helps one person then it's job done.
All my rambling is a mixture of how to and what happened.

I don't expect anyone to go through my posts so a wiki will be done in the future.
As a basic guide for any one wanting good advice and a safe cheap starting point to try.. what ever equipment you have..

Good luck all and thanks for reading and helping make this thread..

Good luck


Dave 8^)

 

As suggested I got some interdental brushes.
I think the wire ones are better as the flexible ones may have more silicone release agent. So I went for the wire ones.
They worked really nice down the 3 pin 4 pin XLR. I think they can be used for application as well as mechanical scrubbing action.
The cheap pipe cleaners I got shedded too many fibres. I believe you can buy non shedding.

One silly tip is using your phone camera zoom to gave a good look at connections.
My eyes are going so a magnified picture shows up more detail and let's you examine for longer.
I never realised Q tips cotton buds shed a lot of fibres... It's why I went for ESD FOAM cleaning sticks for FPGA ASIC cleaning.
They hold a lot of solution as well without breaking Down..

Good luck
Dave

 

I have recently been looking into electrical contacts again. I was trying to improve the wiring for my music server. As you would expect it's a computer so all the connectors are Molex crimp connectors. Generally these use tin plating for the crimp part, and for the most part tin plating for the contact also.

Anyway I was having a long conversation with my friend sandalaudio and he was able to slowly guide me in the right direction. Seems back in the 90's a lot of Japanese hifi brands were starting to use Molex connectors, and they worked fine while used with tinned copper wires. When they started trying to use OFC wire the connections became unreliable and would degrade over time. Where two different metals are in contact, it is important to consider how reactive they will be to one another. Some metals will react more strongly with others. Contacts with two different metals are generally better to avoid. For example where a hifi component uses tin plated connects, it would be better to use a cable with tin plated connectors also. This way the contact resistance will remain low and not degrade due to dissimilar metals reacting with each other. Strangely using a contact enhancer like Deoxit will probably speed up the degradation if it is acting as an electrolyte between the dissimilar contact metals...

Anyway it seems I got this wrong when I was building cables for my computer as I used silver plated OFC wire with the tin plated Molex connectors. Tin and Silver are very reactive. I also selected gold plated molex pins, and everthing else uses tin plated molex. I found a post from a Molex engineer where he discommends the use of bimetallic contacts, and the article also notes that there have been product recalls due to bimetallic contacts...

So anyway I would probably stick to gold plated connectors, or specify silver plated chassis connectors if you want to go down that road. Just generally I want to try and avoid bimetallic contacts, and where they are used avoid using electrolytic lubricants as well. I wonder if the use of Deoxit with my bimetallic contacts is actually contributing to the fouling of the contacts...

I quite like the idea of using crimp connections, as this avoids further dissimilar metals eg in solder and interesting all the high current connections (eg molex) seem to use crimp. Low level stuff still seems to use solder a lot so maybe I don't understand this fully.

 

Another aspect that is not a major consideration in digital based signals but is in audio, is contact patch size and 'consistency'.
This is more of an issue with rolled pins rather than machined pins in say for example the DB series but also the molex and related series of connections.
IOW higher quality mated connector pairs are much more noticeable with analog signals than digital signals.
Of course they both have to be 'clean' but fast changing very low amplitude analog signals are messed with less with lowered resistance thru the connector pair.

As for deoxit gold, it should be used so sparingly that as long as the connections are 'serviced' at all (plugged and unplugged) and perhaps cleaned with a fresh layer of GoldGoo, which is sort of a thing to do with audio connections every once in a while anyway, well, I've never had a problem, in decades of use.

And I've never experienced a situation where using GoldGoo has made any aspect of operation worse.
But there are other contact enhancers available as well and some of them immediately result in being noticed as 'Better'.

JJ

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_corrosion

Most cheaper connectors are plated with the same finish over. Nickel tin.. Ect.
The deoxit removes the metal protecting oxide but resistance causing coating.

It should also keep a moisture resistant layer that stops atmospheric contaminants attacking the surface.
I am no chemist or metallurgist...

The goo' lower Nobel metals act as barriers as well as microscopic fillers.
Two flat surfaces to the eye and touch. .
Are like two porcu pines resting together.
Only the tops touch. The paste increase surface area...

That's my thinking on this...

 

I blow the dust out through the vents the odd time with my electric motorised duster (bought for maintaining my computer) and if my cables or plugs are looking oxidised I clean them up with high percentage isopropyl alcohol (similar to rubbing alcohol with less water content so I don't make it worse).

 

After performing that cleanup later try using an ever so slight amount of DeOxit Gold as a 'cleaner' (see if any residual 'crud' shows up on cleaning surface) and protectant just see if you can hear any difference.

It's a fairly cheap experiment, and you might be surprised at the sonic change.

Also use GoldGoo on the dimms and edge connectors of any cards plugged into any buss connectors and USB sockets, in your computer.
Use as little as possible.
I have 'solved' problems on several crash prone computers that way.

JJ

 

Yeah crimped connections seem to have very specific tolerances needed to meet the specified performance and minimise the contact resistance. This is another reason I gave up on the DIY ATX cabling. It's almost impossible to hand crimp precisely enough. A machine is really needed.

I guess for the analog and digital interconnects where crimp connection is used there might be similar difficulty ensuring oprtimal crimp quality... I was looking at the xhadow xlr's but the crimp design seems a bit crude and easy to damage wires. Neutrik looks a little easier for consistency. I had plans to try the Xhadow on a pure silver cable but there are not a lot of strands so I imaging very difficult to do good crimp with their design.

Galvanic and electrolytic reaction occur because the contacts are different metals which have electropotential between them, so they will react with each other. I think there is probably more to it eg on the chemistry side what the products are of the difference chemical reactions. The other thing is that this chemical reaction in theory could be source of electrical noise, however of course need to consider what the level of this noise is in a quantitative way.

The concern with keeping moisture and air away from joint is to avoid creating electrolytic solution between contacts, so applying an electrolytic lubricant seems a little counterproductive if the aim is to reduce the galvanic or electrolytic action between the contacts. Of course easier is to just use the same metal for the contacts.

Where the contacts are the same material, deoxit can't hurt - I think most digital connections now are gold plated. I have used on my computer connections and seems fine. I'm not brave enough to put it on the CPU yet lol.

 

I silver soldered my crimps in the oppo.....
No more issue...probably something wrong in doing that but sounds good..

 

Thanks for the advice, I'll give those two a try once my PC hardware and audio equipment ages more (all my hobby-related stuff is pretty new at the moment).

 

If you use the wipes that Caig sells, even on new connectors, you might be surprised at what comes off and shows on the cloth material.

JJ

 

Crimp and solder connections, (which I prefer because I can use 'Audio grade' solder for increased contact patch size), are mostly the same in terms of the contact patch between mated pairs of contacts. And it’s the mating surfaces, their contact patch size and their lack of susceptibility to changing the contact patch itself which seems to be of primary importance.

And unless you live in a humid or near the ocean where the salt content of the air is greater (along with increased humidity) which can mess with the galvanic interaction, so using a surface coating as a protectant (like GoldGoo) can reduce the 'spread' of corrosion and can certainly make it easier to maintain the surfaces of the contacts.

As for the real world 'problem' of galvanic interaction, much of it depends upon the electrical potential between the 2 surfaces.
The lower voltages we normally use result in much less galvanic interaction.
And when the surface is 'coated' and air is hindered at getting and interacting with the metals (which is what a protectant does) it further reduces the deleterious effects of GI.

And when contact enhancers are brought into the picture all of these effects seem to be reduced even further, at least that is what I have observed.

JJ