Malcolm Steward: audio journalist

VERBATIM – first published in Hi-Fi Review magazine of December 1989.

Malcolm Steward discovers that cleanliness is next to “oh my godliness!”

Kontak contact cleaner

How many times have we — and others — told you that clean con¬nections in a hi-fi system are vitally important? How many times have we said that, with the exception of 4mm speaker plugs and sockets, the best way to ensure that connec¬tions were as good as could be was to plug and unplug them several times, relying on their self-wiping action to clean them? And for 4mm ‘banana’ plugs and mains plugs we’ve always recommended that you clean them with ‘Duraglit and give them a wash down with isopropyl alcohol afterwards, have we not? These actons we have told you would ensure the best possible con¬tact. Well, not any more. All that has changed.
We have also vigorously recom¬mended that you ignore the magic potions and ‘enhancers’ available for contact maintenance: some of these are ineffectual, and some are posi¬tively dangerous. I have heard tell of one amplifier that had had its socketry and internal connectors treated with just such a wonder fluid. It was, to quote the manufacturer almost verbatim, “totally fu**ed”: totally fin¬ished, let’s say. This ‘cleaning’ potion had left deposits and residue all over the parts it was meant to clean and the only way to return the amplifier to normal was to replace everything the cleaner/enhancer had touched. It proved more economical for the hapless customer to scrap the treated amp and buy a replacement. A costly ‘tweak’ in anybody’s terms I would have thought.

However, a cleaning product I was introduced to recently could just turn our maintenance philosophy on its head. I’ve tried it on parts of my system — not on review gear. I hasten to add, but on the several thousands of pounds worth of stuff I’ve sweated to pay for and which I have no wish to ruin – and I have to say that it looks like a real winner! I cannot yet comment authoritatively on the longevity of the treatment nor on any possible side effects it might have. Let it suffice to say that if I wasn’t wholly convinced that it would cause no harm it wouldn’t have come within a barge-pole’s length of any-thing I’d paid for!
This new product is going to be available by the time you read this column: in fact, we’re so impressed by it that we’re going to be selling it through the offers page of the maga¬zine, so you can easily try it for your-self.

What exactly is this marvelous stuff? I’ve been told the complete story of its genesis but I was asked not to relate it all. All I can say is that it’s a development of a cleaning sub¬stance that has been used in elec-tronics technology of considerably more sophistication and importance than that of the boxes you and I
have littering our living rooms. So this is no ‘magic’ potion coming from the kitchen table of a well-intentioned, bar-room chemist: instead it is the result of serious and studied res¬earch and development by a scientist that has, by coincidence, found its way into the hi-fi arena. As I said, it wasn’t initially intended for this use but it’s here now and we should be very pleased about that fact.

It was brought to me by Ken Proctor of Stilton Audio Systems, the man who works wonders for all man-ner of cartridges with his solid-body modifications. Now Ken is an honest, down-to-earth sort of chap, not prone to flights of fancy, not inter¬ested in ‘black magic’ or arcana; he gels his tweaking kicks by the application of straightforward engineering improvements: commonsense, logi¬cal stuff. For that reason alone I was prepared to trust him. Out of his box of tricks — he’d previously been showing us how he strips and rebuilds some of the cartridges he remodels — he brought two small bottles of fluid; one colourless and one tinged yellow. The first is used to remove the larger deposits of grime from connections; the second is like a finishing cleaner, to clean the then 99% cleaned surface of plugs and sockets. Both substances evaporate very quickly if left open to the air and neither leaves any detectable resi¬due. Ken was at pains to point out that he has checked this with the help of a very powerful microscope. Using this latter apparatus he had examined the results of conventional cleaning methods on various con¬nectors. A 4mm speaker plug, for example, when cleaned with Duraglit, although ‘clean’ and bright to the naked eye, looks nothing of the sort when examined under a ‘scope. “How important is that?” one asks. Well, consider the diverse ampli¬tudes of signal that such a plug has to pass. An orchestral climax might represent 30 volts or so at the end of the speaker cable, so a bit of grime might have little effect upon that. But a muted harmonic from a violin’s top string might only represent a few millionths of a volt. A minute amount of contact resistance and/or semicon¬ductor effects at the plug/socket interface could well do immeasura¬ble damage to such a fragile signal. Viewed in this light, even micro¬scopic muck is going to be bad news.

Think then about the cartridge pins and tags. A typical moving coil like an Audio Technica AT-F5 prod-uces only 0.3mV (1kHz. 5cm/sec): that’s just 3 ten thousandths of a volt.And many more mc’s have outputs lower than that. If dirty speaker plugs make a readily audible difference to the sound of your system what’s going to happen when the cartridge connections degrade?

Now I’d been more than happy until now with the performance of my active Naim SBL system, fronted by its Linn LP12/Naim ARO/Audio Technica ART1 record player. I had considered that the only way I was going to improve it further was by the expensive route: a new compo¬nent maybe. I certainly was not pre-pared for what happened when we pulled off the cartridge leads, clea¬ned them with Ken’s patent potions. then replaced them. To use the ver¬nacular, curtains were drawn back, veils were lifted and smogs cleared. The system’s sound was now notic¬eably cleaner — to employ Ihe obvi¬ous description — with low level detail, especially, more evident and clearly resolved. Playing Little Wing from bass guitarist Jonas Hellborg’s solo LP Elegant Punk showed all manner of subtle and not-so-subtle improvements to the sound. Reverb, finger noises, string chatter and such were brought into sharper focus, individual notes were more deci¬sively etched, and there seemed to be a sense of greater harmonic rich¬ness to the sound of his instrument. The overall sound was, as I’ve said, cleaner, easier to listen in to. Five other listeners were present with me and all were in agreement that an improvement of a worthwhile nature had been wrought.

Listening to another favourite test piece, When The Angels Cry from the latest Jason and The Scorchers’ LP further proved the cleaner’s worth. This track simply begs to be listened to at eardrum-bursting lev¬els, but it lakes an exemplary sys¬tem, well set-up, to accommodate almost full volume setting with this track but there remained a degree or two of the volume control’s rotation that couldn’t be ventured into. After the system had had all its ins and outs scavenged of the detritus it had accumulated by enjoying Lon¬don’s wonderful atmosphere and liv¬ing with a heavy smoker, that rem¬aining sliver of potentiometer track could happily be exploited.
Back to the product and the practicalities of using it. It is called Kontak and comes in two small con¬tainers which contain enough of each solution to spring-clean fully a large system: I had some of each left after going through my system from cartridge pins to speaker sockets. taking care of on the way the plugs and sockets in one preamp. two power supplies, one crossover, two power amps, and the speaker cab¬les. At the time of writing (early Octo¬ber] a retail price of about £15 for the cleaning kit IS anticipated. I have to say that if this were to double between now and when it goes on general sale I would still consider it a bargain.

Kontak is delightfully easy to use: it can be applied to contacts direct — I dunked several plugs straight into the bottles – or by way of cotton wool buds (for 4mm and RCA phono sockets) or pipe cleaners (ideal tor DIN sockets and BNC’s). Its formula¬tion will not affect plastics, cable insulation, clothes etc., so one can apply it with reckless abandon if one so desires. The only caution to be heeded is that it will evaporate rap-idly if left uncapped for too long.

I must confess that I’m quite amazed to find myself enthusing about a product like this. The nine years I spent within the communica¬tions industry taught me that contact cleaners more often did as much harm as good. Initially they took away the grime but left in its place a residue that later gave rise to high resistance contacts, and diode eff¬ects where low-level signals were concerned. Even on low-grade comms circuits, these effects were noticeable enough to discourage the use of such cleaners, and certainly on anything as delicate as a hi-fi system path.

Kontak breaks with that tradition. Of course, it will not perform mira¬cles: it won’t turn a poor system into a brilliant one. But it doesn’t lay claim to being that kind of product. What it will do is help you to exploit the potential of the equipment you have by removing the degrading effects of grease and grime between plug and socket connections. If you feel tempted to resist trying Kontak because your equipment is new, or because you don’t smoke in your lis¬tening room, then I’d still recom¬mend that you give it a go. I took an unused phono socket out of its packaging and gave it the once over: enough dirt came off it to change the colour of a cotton wool bud, suggesting that it had left the manufacturer pre-dirtied! And I won’t tell you about the filth that came out of what I thought were ‘clean’ sock¬ets in my system!
Nothing is going to stop the ingress of grime into the connections of your system so you need a reliable means of disposing of it. Kontak looks to me like the best agent yet.