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By seanxair
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1775620
Just a random question really.

What is the difference, if any, between gold plated (?) plugs on headsets v standard silver plated (?) plugs on headsets? Any benefit from one over the other?

Toying with the idea of some David Clark H10-13.4 and have seen two pairs on eBay which look the same except for the blingy plugs.
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By Flyin'Dutch'
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1775628
Because they are more shiny as you said!

:D

I have had both versions and could not discern any difference in many years of use; my Dutchness would suggest you get the best bang for your buck and that would determine my decision irrespective of colour of pins.

PS I don't believe in golden loudspeaker cable.
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#1775703
Not seen gold plated GA headset connector in the common size. Even Bose does not gold plate theirs. More likely solid brass or chrome plated.

Brass used to be the default, but is prone to oxidising. They need to be cleaned regurally to avoid noisy connections, but when clean will provide a better connection than chome plated. Most heasets are sold with chrome plated now, but 3rd party replacements cords are usually brass.
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By Morten
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1775756
The only advantage of gold plating (no pun intended) is to avoid corrosion which nickel or other plating already does suitably well.

Gold plating connectors is cheap and easy any everyone does it so they can boast that it is gold plated...

As FD says, choose your headset based on other factors, the gold plating is unlikely to have any other value than marketing.

(Gold is quite useless for almost anything practical. But it does have some thermal benefits in terms of thermal conductivity/mass, which is why you see that multi-layer insulation used on spacecraft has a gold vapour deposit on the outer most layer, giving them that goldfoil look - but the gold vapour layer is less expensive than the kapton substrate it sits on...
I also seem to remember that the MacLaren F1 road car had a gold plated cross member over the engine bay - again apparently for thermal reasons...)
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By Joe Dell
#1775796
Morten wrote:
(Gold is quite useless for almost anything practical. But it does have some thermal benefits in terms of thermal conductivity/mass, which is why you see that multi-layer insulation used on spacecraft has a gold vapour deposit on the outer most layer, giving them that goldfoil look - but the gold vapour layer is less expensive than the kapton substrate it sits on...


Nicked
"Typically, an aircraft engine has up to 23 parts that contain precious metals. Various aircraft engine parts that use precious metals include vanes, stators, blades, fuel nozzles, fuel manifolds, Tobi Ducts, and heat exchangers. Parts of an aircraft’s engine turbine system and avionics system use gold and silver. And aircraft blades use platinum. Recovery of precious metals can account for up to 50 percent of an aircraft engine’s recycling value. The recovery value of precious metal in a JT8D engine, for instance, could go to as high as $40,000.
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By Morten
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1775820
Joe Dell wrote:Nicked
:lol: It's a fair cop. But in my defense (other than the word 'quite' - as opposed to 'completely' in my original post ;)) the use of gold in exotic thermal environments was sort of what I said it had a practical use for. As, to be fair, is the non-corrosion aspects if you are dealing with small scale and low voltage electronics where reliability of connections and the ease of working with/manufacturability is important. It'd probably cost rather more than USD 40,000 to extract those USD 40,000 of precious metal.
You could just 'filter' seawater if you really wanted the stuff. Apparently the Med has 3 times the concentration of gold per volume than average. Good luck with that :)
Or google "16 Psyche" :)

I'd be interested to know though - the JT8D is rather old - whether those same applications are now using ceramics instead...
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By rdfb
#1775841
Morten wrote:The only advantage of gold plating (no pun intended) is to avoid corrosion which nickel or other plating already does suitably well.


Also gold doesn't tarnish. If both sides (the socket and your plug) were gold plated, then theoretically you'd never have to do that rotate the plug (and hear crackling) thing when you have a bad connection until it sits right. I don't recall ever having that with GA plugs though - I guess that they're chunky and tight enough that any tarnish gets worn off by itself anyway. It's more of an issue with 3.5mm plugs.
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By Rob L
#1776085
MikeW wrote:I thought they were nickel plated rather than chrome?....


Chromium won't adhere to steel. To my recollection, copper will, but chromium won't stick to copper either.
So the plating process is:
Steel plated with copper then
Copper plated with nickel
Then chromium or silver or gold to the nickel.

Or something like that; I used to know the order, 40 years ago :shock: I'm getting old.

Gold is the only metallic element that will not corrode in the presence of oxygen (I think mercury does not too, but that's a bit useless at room temperature!)

Incidentally, gold is so inert that in can be ingested quite safely...I have been to a few Sikh ceremonies where the candies are gold-leaf covered; the weight of gold leaf so wrapped is (so I'm told) not worth the effort of recovering!
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By Paul_Sengupta
FLYER Club Member  FLYER Club Member
#1776680
As above, never seen gold plated on a GA headset.

The options, as stated, are brass, or nickel plated. The brass ones *do* tarnish. I've had to clean lots of them in my time for various people. A kitchen sponge/scourer thing is ideal, not too rough, and solves any crackling and other audio issues. Clean until shiny.

The nickel plated ones don't need cleaning, ever.