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Mapleshade Silclear

Category: Accessories

I'm not a big proponent of the "WOW" factor, meaning very few tweaks have caused me to go "WOW". The wow ones include rebuilding my McCormack DNA .5 amp to near Rev A, changing the caps in my speakers from Axon's to Sonicaps, and few others. Now that doesn't mean I don't hear differences and improvements with other tweaks, it's just that I don't believe in overemphasizing these differences into religous revalations and such.

So, Silclear doesn't fall into the "WOW" category with me, but it did make an improvement in my rig. The simplest explanation of these changes I can make goes like this. Have you ever cleaned the contacts on your interconnects, speaker cables and power cords after a year or more of ignoring them? Did you hear the improvements in transparency and quieter backgrounds? Well I just cleaned everything over the New Year's holidays with cotton balls and alcohol with an application of SST (to signal wires) and Pro-Gold (to electrical connections) afterwards. Now, in February I applied Silclear to everything in my system that has a plug, jack or socket. This means interconnects, speaker cables, fuses, all electrical jacks inside my amp & CD player and DAC, electrical cords, tube pins, phono cartridge pins, etc. The difference was as if I left all these connections to tarnish for a year or more and then cleaned them all again.

Now, given that I just did the cleaning I can conclude that Silclear took this one step farther than alcohol and SST. Things were more transparent and noticeably punchier. The bass was louder (dammit - I had to turn down the sub's volume and rebalance the bottom end again). Soundstaging and imaging seemed to be a slight/tiny bit more forward than before, maybe because things seemed a bit louder at the same volume settings. Tonally everything was still balanced, just more there in terms of detail and nuance and definition. But I also found that there was a sense of more "realness" to instruments, especially cymbals (hearing more brass with the zing), and voice (more in the room presence), and piano (more body and weight). The system sounded quieter too - i.e. blacker backgrounds (but this can also vary by time of day as the power grid changes).

Is this a "wow" review in disguise? Perhaps for many it is, but I already have a whole lot of transparency and realness in my system (see "Isn't Anything Stock?" for my system details). I now have more of that than before.

I really can't report that there were any bad aftereffects of the Silclear either. There's no way to undo the application easily (it's a grease), so there's no A-B testing available. So many tweaks improve on thing at the expense of another - not here. It's a good thing (thank you Martha Stewart, now go directly to jail and don't pass "GO").

Enjoy,
Bob
ptmconsulting

Showing 1 response by garybob

garybob's avatar
garybob
4 posts
 
Danger, Will Robinson!
Put Silclear on everything a year ago with great noticable improvements, but then after a few months, a heavy layer of muddiness had settled into my system. I thought it was a tube problem. Had the maddening experience of switching pre-amp tubes from channel to channel to identify problem ones, only to find that the switching of tubes would fix the problem for a few days to a few weeks, then the mud would return. At one point, I noticed that when sounding muddy, working the volume knob in my TRL pre-amp would cause crackles. So, sent the pre-amp back to TRL for repairs.
Turns out, the pre-amp was fine, but the problem was caused by the Silclear in the tube sockets. Paul at TRL explained that this product starts out as a good contact enhancer, but then heat changes it so that it eventually becomes an insulator. The system starts to sound worse and worse and you don't know why.
The fix was to remove the Silclear from everything, which took me 6 hours of careful scrubbing with white gas. I then replaced it with QuickSilver from Xtreme AV, which Paul claims does not degrade and become an insulator with time, and does not tend to migrate when heated. The result, all the mud is gone, and I am now enjoying the music again.
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