Are contact treatments worth the money?

I like Kontak myself....and yes they do work...I use a pipe cleaner and you will be amazed at the amount of dirt / junk at the end of the cleaner when your done

hmmmm. any scientific testing to back up the implied improvements? Got to watch out for that placebo effect.

Science hasn't answered all of the universe's questions, last I checked. My ears tell me that Walker silver paste improves the sound without a doubt. An improvement in transparency was immediately obvious after treating my MC240. I then did the rest of my system. But, it does take a good bit of system resolution before this level of improvement becomes apparent.

Arthur

Gorilla Glue works well on Banana plugs. Duck Tape works well on wing nuts but there is nothing like silicone for tweeters ;-)

Aball,
No, science has not answered all the universe's question. You are correct. However, this is an engineering problem, not a philosophical one. Believe it or not, things to do with electricity or electronics fall into the realm of electrical engineering.

I cannot explain why some 12ax7's sound better to me than others do. Most EE's that I know would not care to delve into that question and would probably shirk it off as being trivial or hokum. On the question of contact treatment, I would tend to believe that if the contacts are corroded or oxidized somewhat, then cleaning would help. This brings to my mind the question of whether the impedance effects of oxidation are linear or non-linear through the frequency spectrum. If it is linear, no worries -- turn the volume up. If it is non-linear, clean the contacts, then turn the volume up some more.

I would really like to see scientific evidence (i.e. impedance data) that contact treatments actually improve conductance between two clean conductive metals.

Another "for instance" of audiophilogy beliefs is skin-effect of audio cables. An EE prof of mine while I worked in audio shops during school worked out the calculations for skin effect for audio frequencies and a decade above for "monstrous" cables, and for coax wires. Guess what? None. No skin effect at these frequencies.

I think there is quite a bit of marketing driving our audiophile beliefs. Marketing guys sell product...