The Great Cryo'd Outlet Test

FWIW, Last Friday evening I installed my cryo-treated Hubbell (non-plated) 20 amp wall outlets for every component and noticed a very nice improvement after only two hours of burn-in.

I'll spare the details but in short, the improvements were on the order of only perhaps 50% of the improvements noticed when I replaced my amplifier's Hubbell 20 amp IEC connector with a cryo-treated version of the same make and model.

On Saturday, I installed 2 Marinco and 1 Hubbell cryo-treated wall plugs on the ends of my passive in-line conditioners and then installed two cryo-treated Schurter 15 amp IEC connectors on the other ends of the remaining two line conditioners for the cdp and pre.

Did not notice any improvement here. The Schurters are of inferior build quality to the standard Hubbell IEC's and will be replaced soonish with 2 cryo-treated Marinco IEC connectors.

-IMO

Are they the same Hubbell wall outlet "before/after" cryo treatment? How do you compare them since you can't swap things around quickly enough and there is no turning back to non-cryo stage?

Hi Stehno. I just noticed that you still have the FIM 880 outlets listed in your Virtual System. Have you determined that they are still the best in your system?

Sherod, I have the FIM 880's up for sale.

S23chang these are not the same hubbell outlets prior to cryo-treatment. How can I tell the difference without A/B the outlets quickly? That would have been a question I could have answered quickly and confidently a few weeks ago. Today, I would still answer a question like that exactly as before, but now I dare not say quickly and confidently. :)

-IMO

This was an interesting experiment. Sorry that I didn't have time to read it until now, but I have a few comments which may be of interest.

(1) I work in a technical area and have had a lot of fun reading and speculating about the effects of cryo treatment. In my line of work, I have access to some simple liquid nitrogen cryo temperature apparatus. So I assigned someone to just do a simple test of resistance change. We were careful to use very slow cooling - reducing the temperature over about a week's time - to prevent thermal shock. We were also careful not to use plated metals which I have read can have undesirable thermal cryo-treatment effects due to different contraction/expansion rates of the plating and base metals during rapid cooling. We also used very slow temperature rise (about a week) again to minimize thermal shock. The result showed a small decrease (a few % for most metals) in DC resistance of the metals from such cryo treatment.

(2) Non-cryoed outlets may sound better than cryoed outlets of the same model if they both use plated metal.

(3) Realize that any such small resistance change may not be the cause of any effect that you might hear, if any at all. Many of the problems of electrical conductivity between metals in contact are not the result of resistance, but are due to barrier potential effects - the understanding that electrons naturally exist at different energies in different metals. When two different metal types are placed in contact (as with most connectors including AC outlets) non-linear effects arise due to this barrier effect which can be changed from changing the properties of the metals used.