What is preferred/best contact cleaner these days?

@vinylvalet 

No we have not.  We have read many comments from those who've used it and other enhancers and have been more impressed with both Total Contact and especially the Q45T. I have about 245 individual contacts to treat if you count each pin on a tube of which I have 9 tubes in my system.  My friends and I are pretty heavy into trying out many different tweaks, many of which have raise the SQ of our systems considerably.  If one of us tries something that really works great, we share it with the other two and it usually is a group home run.  The Q45T is just one of them.  If you are gonna go to all the trouble of treating all of your contacts, you'd really like to have as much prior info on the different choices as in my case, it's about a 3-4 hour job to do mine.  Not something you want to have to do over and over.  I'd pretty much guarantee that you'd love the results and even more as the weeks go by and it causes jumps in performance while you just sit there and enjoy the music.  

Good luck

Bob

Thanks, Bob. I appreciate your detailed response and sharing the experience with your friends earlier. I understand completely.

Might be worth a try one day. If equal or better than Q45T or even slightly less effective, many audiophiles would love paying about 1/6 the cost.

Stabilant 22 is the concentrate and the Kit as previously mentioned allows you to do a proper dilution with alcohol and is then referred to as Stabilant 22A.  I use pure Isopropyl (99.9%) from Amazon.  It is a proven contact enhancer used in avionics, NASA, auto industry, etc.  It does have a detergent and lubricating action.

The alcohol evaporates very quickly leaving the Stabilant on your connectors, etc.  I use it on every connection in my system.  Using a very small brush is ideal.  Overapplication is not the intent and will just waste the product.  Nothing is equivalent or performs better.

Michael Dayton Wright invented Stabilant 22 and was famous for his XG10 Electrostatic Loudspeaker and so many other electronics and conventional loudspeakers.  A brilliant fellow that I had the pleasure of knowing for many years. I believe that he held degrees in electrical, mechanical and chemical engineering from MIT.

As a sidebar trivia, he was the first to use black enclosures for his electronics!  His family continues to produce Stabilant 22. There are a number of papers that detail its actions in great detail.

Check-out the Dayton Wright Hommage loudspeaker: 

@perazzi28, Good post.  Thanks for the link, too.

Stabilant 22 and Q45T are the two products I’m interested in.  Plan to try 22 soon. 

In another thread here on AG, I learned that George Merrill of Analog Emporium sells it for perhaps the lowest price in the USA.  So, I’m getting it there since he’s very close by.  Just passing along a pricing tip to anyone else interested.

FWIW, George told me the smaller bottle is enough to do my system many many times over and that once applied it lasts for 20 years.

If I decide to try the Q45T eventually, I wonder if the maker/seller of it would advise I remove the Stabiltant 22.  If anyone knows how to remove Stabilant 22, please share.  I will ask George M, of course.

@dorkwad, how is Q45T removed?

@rc22 

It is easily removed with 90% alcohol.  Q45T