Comparing the cleaned and TMDed lead to the untreated control was chastening. The difference in the musical accomplishment of the players, the emotional depth in their performance, their technical and communicative skills was pretty astonishing. It was all there with the uncleaned leads: you just couldn’t decipher it; there was no subtlety or nuance in this most nuanced of music. Listening to the uncleaned leads was a little like watching a football match played in long grass: you couldn’t see the player’s feet and the ball was all-but invisible. Cleaning the connections was like mowing and remarking the pitch. Super TMD was like sending on Messi, Ronaldo and Vinicius Jr – with Zola, Mbappe and Zidane sat on the bench. Because, bear in mind, at this point, I’ve only cleaned and treated a single set of leads. The rest of the cables and connections await.
Now, as mentioned above, a BNC lead is all ready to go. Listening to that using the same protocol, the results are if anything, marginally better, certainly on sonic grounds, although that might just reflect the extra performance headroom available from the Levinson’s DAC. Either way, the clean and enhance routine definitely works on digital leads.
After that, it was simply a case of extending the procedure across the system, not forgetting power cords and ground cables. For this I dispensed with the DeoxIT entirely, cleaning the contact surfaces thoroughly with the TMD – removing plenty of visible contaminants on the ‘dirty’ Q-tips and rubbing patches in the process. In this instance, and given the number of connections to be cleaned I actually possessed myself of enough patience to double-coat the contacts with a second, thin layer of Super TMD, leaving an hour in between applications. It also means powering the system down, which in turn means leaving time for it to warm back up. Of course, you can mitigate that by substituting other power cords while you work on the ones the system actually uses…
With everything cleaned and coated and the system warmed back up, the sound has developed enormously. This isn’t about big changes in dynamics or bandwidth. It’s about the tiny subtleties that inform a performance, the ability of the system to track tiny changes in level. There’s a purity to the sound, tonally but also in terms of coherence and flow. It’s almost as if you can hear the lower resistance, the ease with which the system passes the signal, the way it captures the subtle inflexions and variations in the playing. There’s no sense of the mechanics of reproduction intruding. Instead, the system steps back, allowing notes to appear, just as and when they should. The change is tiny in terms of magnitude – but massive in terms of natural, expressive range. I said this music should be beautiful and that’s exactly what it’s become, from the purity of the notes and harmonics, to the perfectly poised playing, the natural way in which the instruments breathe to the musical conversation that’s so apparent between the two musicians.
