Where to Use Gold Connectors

If you happen to deal with any type of industrial equipment that have any form of hermetic connectors, you should always ensure that gold plated connectors are used; this is especially true when your equipment will be used in humid or dirty environment. We all know that gold is a great material because of its properties such as non-corrosiveness. Apart from being rare and expensive, gold is also to be a bit soft and will not stand repeated mating cycles like other metals would. However, when gold plated connectors are taken through an electrical connector metal finishing process they cannot be easily moved.

When you are out shopping for hermetic connectors, you are likely to notice that when it comes to industrial equipment engineers will almost always order for gold plated connectors in pairs. Every self-respecting engineer will know better than to ask for gold plated connectors on one side and nickel plated connectors on the other side; this is normally a case of wasted resources. Gold plated connectors may cost about three times what you would pay for nickel plated connectors but the trouble with these mismatched pairs is that the nickel side will almost always corrode faster than the gold plated side leading to the failure of the connector.

These days, you can even be able to buy a guitar and signal cables that have gold plated connectors which simply look great. Apart from the looks, the gold will ensure that they will simply never corrode until perhaps such a time as when the gold eventually wears off. However, you must make sure that you don’t plug the gold plated connector cables into a cheap jack or you will still end up with the same problem. Gold plated connectors will almost always be found in newer guitars as opposed to the older versions; the older ones may have had nickel plated connectors or brass that easily wears off. If you are investing in gold plated connectors, invest a few more bucks and have your guitar tech install a gold plated.

The same case applies to amplifiers; you only need to peer into the chassis of any old amplifier and you can be sure that you will not see any gold. Stereo amplifiers of the days gone by may be worse especially because they may have been designed to minimize costs. In most cases you will the connectors outside with some gold flashing on the outside but that is as far as it can go. If you are looking for equipment that will last for as long as you can imagine, you must ensure that you always go for that which has gold plated connectors all the time.