Bananas rule, spades drool. End of discussion.

I’ll chime in with a comment on this topic.  I had spades for many years and I think one of the two cables would come loose and drop off every couple of years.  It didn’t occur to me that I could use channel locks to tighten them so they wouldn’t fall off.  Finally I discovered that there are different sizes for spades!  At that point I examined mine and they were clearly too big for my binding posts.  That was clearly the reason they would fall off.  So I finally switched to locking bananas.  That brought up another problem.  For some reason I struggle to open them and I’ve actually come to dislike them.  I’ve read that regular bananas  can loosen but I have them on my electrostatic speakers and they’ve never seemed loose.  And I’ve had the same bananas for decades.  So I prefer regular bananas.

I’ve had trouble with spades coming loose.  I finally learned to use channel locks on them.  More recently I discovered that there are different sizes of spades!  I learned that mine are way too big for my binding posts.  The spade prongs are too wide apart and the binding posts barely  grab them.  I finally switched to bananas and thinking locking bananas bananas were superior to bananas, I chose the locking sorts.  I have come to dislike them because I struggle to loosen them when needed.  Just last weekend I had to wait for a male visitor that I could ask to loosen locking bananas for me..  I had been given an Audio Video Receiver and the male who gave it to me tightened the locking bananas.  The binding posts are so close together I couldn’t get a good grip on them nor would the channel locks fit in either so I was really stuck.  It’s actually a challenge to find regular bananas on speaker cables.

I vote for regular bananas.  I was using spades for decades between amp and speakers and once in awhile one of the speaker wires would come loose and fall off my amplifier. Recently I finally discovered the reason I was having problems.  It was because there are different sizes of spades and I didn’t have the right size for my binding posts.  The spades were too big with the result that when I tightened down on them there wasn’t much spade real estate to clamp down on.  I’m not really fond of the locking bananas that seem so popular these days and that’s what I wanted to avoid.  Why?  To illustrate, a friend gave me a Sony AVR just a couple of weeks ago and he  helped me install it.  He was the one that tightened the locking bananas.  I decided against keeping the AVR and could not open the locking bananas.  The spacing of the binding posts was very close and I couldn’t get a good grip on them with either my fingers or any tool for the same reason, the right spacing.   I had to wait days before a handy male showed up who was stronger than I am and he was finally able to loosen them.  So I will repeat myself to say I prefer regular bananas.