24 Carat contacts?

[Never2Late]

Has anyone sourced, or utilized gold-contact switches or RCA jacks to mitigate corrosion and improve guitar signal?  What would you recommend?

[Disturber]

No. I think of it this way. If all my favoruite guitarists and albums were recorded with ordinary cable, and they all sound absolutely great, then it's probably fine for me to use ordinary cables too.

[tomteriffic]

I've used some RCA's with gold-plated connectors, some even going into gold plated jacks.  I may even have a guitar cable around someplace with gold plated plugs.

But I'm not sure there are any significant benefits.  When I got this stuff, gold-plated was all the rage and it was almost impossible to find, for instance, hi-fi cables that were NOT gold plated.  These were typically very thin "flash" plating and they certainly weren't 24K.  14K is probably closer to it.  Gold is very, very soft and while it has excellent conductivity, the wear factor would be such that, with repeated plugging/unplugging/switching, the gold would wear off in short order.  These days, I'm sure that any marginal increase in conductivity would be more than offset by the extra expense and shorter service life. Better cabling between the ends would probably have more effect.

Besides, a can of Caig De-Oxit is a helluva lot cheaper.

[Never2Late]

I see....I had a crusty switchcraft replacement on a stock, but rarely-used Hamer recently, and with this new build I'm putting-together, I was thinking there 'might' be some higher-quality parts out there I should consider. 

[anotherfreak]

The only "advantage" to gold is the corrosion resistance at the contact points. I would imagine that would wear off pretty quick on switches and cable contacts.

[Armitage]

Funny thing, most audiophile gold parts are gold colored chrome... gold is a "color" too. Gold is used for anti corrosion, like anotherfreak said, but it wears off really fast when you plug stiff things in and out, and in and out.