If you ever go to buy a cable for a TV – be it a scart cable, a coax lead, or even an HDMI lead – you’ll often find they offer them with gold-plated connectors. I’ve often been told these are the best thing to get, as they give the best sort of connection, but then it has also been said that it only really works if you have gold connectors on both sides, i.e. the socket AND the plug are gold-plated.
Well, so I’m told, it doesn’t matter either way. Gold-plating connectors isn’t done for signal purposes. No, like many things, it’s a money thing. When connector manufacturers make connectors, they tend to churn the out in batches, then throw them into warehouses until they are sold. When metal sits around doing nothing, unless treated, it’ll corrode, or rust, or just build up a surface coating of various nasty things which erode the signal quality.
If you’re a connector manufacturer, you don’t want supposedly ‘new’ connectors going out from stock looking very tarnished, so the solution – gold-plate them! The gold won’t corrode and affect the signal, so basically, they are gold-plated so that they can whack out as many as they like, sit them in storage for years on end, yet still sell and use them like they’re brand new.
I was told this by a colleague who in a previous life worked in the connector industry, and it does sound pretty convincing. Cable manufacturers, knowing that we’re all like a bunch of magpies (ooo! shiny!), make the fact they’re gold-plated sound good, add a few quid to the price, and make a wee bit more profit. You get a supposedly ‘superior’ cable, the cable manufacturer makes a bit more profit for doing nothing other than putting ‘gold-plated’ on the box, and the connector manufacturer has shifted 2-year-old stock.
Everybody wins! Kinda.