TMD is both a cleaner and a contact enhancer, so using it does both jobs at once. However, once you’ve cleaned the contacts, the company recommends leaving the cleaned surfaces for an hour and then applying a second coat of the fluid. Application of the TMD contact enhancer is a straightforward process: shake the bottle and then apply a minimal amount of fluid to the contact area, making sure that you don’t inadvertently bridge the insulation between contacts. In terms of testing the musical benefits of the treatment, I deviated slightly from the recommended approach, as I wanted to check whether TMD would improve over my normal cleaning protocol – and, if so, by how much? I listened to the system, cleaned the contacts in my normal fashion, listened again and then applied the TMD exactly as instructed. I used my Wadia S7i and Levinson 585 as test subjects, partly because they kept the task manageable and partly because they haven’t been subjected to the housekeeping regime recently. Because cleaning is an irreversible process, any attempt to create a precise control is fraught with difficulties, but the best I could do was an identical set of (untreated) interconnects and a parallel set of inputs on the amplifier. With the 585 that means running RCAs, as it only has a single set of balanced inputs, but as it turned out the differences were obvious enough to render the control unnecessary, apart from its observational/descriptive function.
Cleaning house…
The first thing to report is just how easy the mini cotton buds are to use and, judging from their state after use, just how effective they are. They don’t shed and they pick up a lot of grime, even from sockets previously cleaned with pipe cleaners – the previously applied but less than satisfactory alternative. The ability to reach into tight spaces and do so while also applying pressure on the surface to be cleaned definitely makes a difference, while their resistance to the sharp-edged flanges on BNC plugs (cleaned through the diagonal slots in the locking collars) is particularly impressive. You won’t simply be replacing grime with cotton waste… Combined with the rough, textured pads that come with the DeoxIT cleaning kit, it’s never been so easy to spruce up RCA (or XLR) connectors and sockets.
I started by cleaning one set of RCA leads and a 75Ω digital interconnect, along with their corresponding sockets on the 585. With only one set of RCA outs and a single BNC output on the Wadia, those sockets stayed untreated for the moment. This allowed me to run parallel analogue and digital chains between the CD player and amp, one set cleaned, the others not, simply by swapping leads at the player outputs. As comparisons go, it ain’t perfect: simply inserting and removing connectors has at least some impact on the connection itself, ‘wiping’ the surfaces in the process. But the benefits of even a single set of cleaned leads and sockets in a system are such that those changes pale into insignificance.
