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Bare Copper vs Silver Plated vs Gold vs Rhodium

gidders

hifi enthusiast, golfer & photographer
Has anyone compared IEC connectors & can comment on the merits or otherwise of various plating options?

Thanks
 
1cm of mildly increased resistance makes bugger all difference, so go for rhodium plating it's the hardest contact metal. Silver and copper both tarnish, gold gets scraped off.
 
Plating material affects corrosion resistance. Unless you're in a harsh environment, no particular plating is needed. The usual bare or nickel-plated brass is fine. Any plating is only going to be a few micrometres thick, so resistivity is of no concern.

Even if the plating material did have some effect on the flow of electricity, bear in mind that the house wiring uses bare copper and brass. One such connection more or less isn't going to matter.

go for rhodium plating it's the hardest contact metal
You don't want too hard a surface as that reduces the contact area.
 
1cm of mildly increased resistance makes bugger all difference, so go for rhodium plating it's the hardest contact metal. Silver and copper both tarnish, gold gets scraped off.
That's what I have found. As I frequently have to re-plug connectors, I tend to go for rhodium. My older gold plated plugs are getting rather bare!
 
Exotic metals are for dry contacts, mV to V levels at tiny currents.
Mains voltages at Amps work perfectly with tin or nickel
That's my understanding.

FYI from an RF project implemented by some former colleagues, with 2 * 50W carriers on an antenna cable and a -120 dBm intermodulation product specification, you must avoid nickel (or any other ferromagnetic material) on or near the RF connectors. The hysteresis causes passive intermodulation. Rusty bolts or similar on antenna assemblies cause loss of capacity and so loss of mobile system operator revenue.

I think there's no such worries for mains, where I believe the UK requirement is for THD to remain lower than 8% (5% for individual harmonics).

And as far as contact resistance is concerned, in the UK's mains system about 10% of consumers see 0.25 Ω or more from just the supplier connection. So no such worries here AFAICS about a reasonable few mΩ from a solidly made IEC connector, whatever the metallurgy.
 
That's my understanding.

FYI from an RF project implemented by some former colleagues, with 2 * 50W carriers on an antenna cable and a -120 dBm intermodulation product specification, you must avoid nickel (or any other ferromagnetic material) on or near the RF connectors. The hysteresis causes passive intermodulation. Rusty bolts or similar on antenna assemblies cause loss of capacity and so loss of mobile system operator revenue.

I think there's no such worries for mains, where I believe the UK requirement is for THD to remain lower than 8% (5% for individual harmonics).

And as far as contact resistance is concerned, in the UK's mains system about 10% of consumers see 0.25 Ω or more from just the supplier connection. So no such worries here AFAICS about a reasonable few mΩ from a solidly made IEC connector, whatever the metallurgy.

They can do far worse than that and can act as very crude rectifiers = mixers, and generate all sorts of spurious output.
 


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