How can you tell if you have shorted out a connection?

15 Feb 2007 10:10 PM

macrovision

When applying Quick Silver Gold contact enhancer to the component outputs
of my DVD player, some of the contact enhancer painted the inside wall of
the female hole. This seems inevitable since the instructions state to
paint the male pin with contact enhancer. At the same time the
instructions warn to not get any paint on the insulation inside the female
hole.
Is video/audio degradation obviously apparent if a short has been caused?
Thanks for the help!

15 Feb 2007 11:56 PM

Gene E. Bloch

On 2/15/2007, macrovision posted this:

> When applying Quick Silver Gold contact enhancer to the component outputs
> of my DVD player, some of the contact enhancer painted the inside wall of
> the female hole. This seems inevitable since the instructions state to
> paint the male pin with contact enhancer. At the same time the
> instructions warn to not get any paint on the insulation inside the female
> hole.
> Is video/audio degradation obviously apparent if a short has been caused?
> Thanks for the help!

If you have really shorted out a connection, the corresponding signal
goes away.

Why, pray tell, are you painting contacts with conductive paint (which
is how I interpret what you said)?

OK, I just went to their website. Reading there, I can't tell whether
the stuff in conductive. If not, there is no problem. However, after a
brief perusal of the site, I became firmly convinced that it is
ophidian lubricant.

--
Gene E. Bloch (Gino)
letters617blochg3251
(replace the numbers by "at" and "dotcom")

16 Feb 2007 12:58 AM

macrovision

It is conductive. The instructions:
http://www.xtremecables.com/PDFsQS/QSApplicationInstructions.pdf
warn of getting the paint inside the female jacks, but at the same time
direct you to apply paint to the male pins. Unfortunately this
contradiction didn’t occur to me until after I had treated most of my
interconnects.
To be honest I'm not sure if this is "snake oil" or not. The picture was
dramatically different on my LD player, but this may have been from
cleaning all of the connections with a detox solution that was included.
If I understand you correctly, if a short is caused there is NO mistaking
it. Either no picture/audio or severe picture degradation.

16 Feb 2007 2:16 AM

Gene E. Bloch

On 2/15/2007, macrovision posted this:

> It is conductive. The instructions:
> http://www.xtremecables.com/PDFsQS/QSApplicationInstructions.pdf
> warn of getting the paint inside the female jacks, but at the same time
> direct you to apply paint to the male pins. Unfortunately this
> contradiction didnâ€™t occur to me until after I had treated most of my
> interconnects.
> To be honest I'm not sure if this is "snake oil" or not. The picture was
> dramatically different on my LD player, but this may have been from
> cleaning all of the connections with a detox solution that was included.
> If I understand you correctly, if a short is caused there is NO mistaking
> it. Either no picture/audio or severe picture degradation.

To clarify about the short: the term usually means a near-zero-ohm
fault, just as though a switch was closed. In that case, you would
indeed see no signal.

If instead you get various amounts of conductive material in there
giving a less dramatic resistance, anything is possible. The best bet
would be to measure the resistance across the terminals before painting
and again after, to see if there's much of a change.

That's obviously impractical in the jacks on the box itself at this
moment, but if you painted the cable ends, you can assume the original
resistance was infinite; any other value that you see is thus a true
reading.

Anyway, the effect would depend on the impedance of the circuit in
question. Typical line-level audio is at 47 Kohm; reducing it to a
couple of K could have a dramatic effect on the signal level. OTOH,
typical line-level video is at 75 ohm. Putting a couple of K in
parallel with that would cause less of an effect than typical
tolerances in the circuitry, i.e., no detectable effect at all.

--
Gene E. Bloch (Gino)
letters617blochg3251
(replace the numbers by "at" and "dotcom")

21 Feb 2007 2:28 AM

Max Haltermann

Show quote Hide quote

"Gene E. Bloch" <spamfree@nobody.invalid> wrote in message
news:mn.7c487d721ba03357.1980@nobody.invalid...
> On 2/15/2007, macrovision posted this:
>> It is conductive. The instructions:
>> http://www.xtremecables.com/PDFsQS/QSApplicationInstructions.pdf warn of
>> getting the paint inside the female jacks, but at the same time
>> direct you to apply paint to the male pins. Unfortunately this
>> contradiction didn't occur to me until after I had treated most of my
>> interconnects. To be honest I'm not sure if this is "snake oil" or not.
>> The picture was
>> dramatically different on my LD player, but this may have been from
>> cleaning all of the connections with a detox solution that was included.
>> If I understand you correctly, if a short is caused there is NO mistaking
>> it. Either no picture/audio or severe picture degradation.
>
> To clarify about the short: the term usually means a near-zero-ohm fault,
> just as though a switch was closed. In that case, you would indeed see no
> signal.
>
> If instead you get various amounts of conductive material in there giving
> a less dramatic resistance, anything is possible. The best bet would be to
> measure the resistance across the terminals before painting and again
> after, to see if there's much of a change.
>
> That's obviously impractical in the jacks on the box itself at this
> moment, but if you painted the cable ends, you can assume the original
> resistance was infinite; any other value that you see is thus a true
> reading.
>
> Anyway, the effect would depend on the impedance of the circuit in
> question. Typical line-level audio is at 47 Kohm; reducing it to a couple
> of K could have a dramatic effect on the signal level. OTOH, typical
> line-level video is at 75 ohm. Putting a couple of K in parallel with that
> would cause less of an effect than typical tolerances in the circuitry,
> i.e., no detectable effect at all.
>
> --
> Gene E. Bloch (Gino)
> letters617blochg3251
> (replace the numbers by "at" and "dotcom")
>

If there is a partial short or leakage you may see flicker either on the
whole screen or part thereof, usually in broad bands across.
Max.