Bananas rule, spades drool. End of discussion.


I just checked my speaker connections. All using bananas, all nice and tight.

The number of times I’ve had spades get loose instead though.....

Point is, and it really is kind of a tongue in cheek thing, bananas beat spades for long term reliability in almost all setups.  If you have to use a Cardas or Mundorf speaker terminal to ensure your spades stay tight it kind of proves my point.

erik_squires

Showing 2 responses by tksteingraber

@larryi had a tube related experience where I was moving my amp around installing speaker cables fussing with close binding posts with spades.  Fired up my amp and tube preamp all was good.  Added isolation springs under my amp and my right channel had a slight noise and went silent.  Moved amp and  checked speaker post and spades had spun and were touching.  Checked all cables and interconnects and couldn’t get the channel back = thought I blew the channel.  Arranged to have it sent to mfg to repair and right before I was going to send  it I thought let me check my preamp tubes.  Turns out one of my brand new NOS 6SN7 tubes failed without noise exactly when I was adding my iso springs.  What are the odds on that…surprised me and lesson learned.

With you on this one.  Bananas are much more convenient  to install with our ever increasing cable sizes.  Especially with how close makers design their speaker posts so darn close together.  Give us some space guys.  No matter how tight you tighten smooth gold, copper, silver or rhodium spades they tend to want to spin risking a potential contact with a neighbor. I cracked a speaker post base trying to keep spades from spinning.  Haven’t suffered SQ using bananas that I can notice.