? for Proac Response Owners

I have ProAcs and am running them with biwired Analysis Plus Oval 9 with WBT banana termination. However, I also own the previously mentioned Analysis Plus Silver Oval jumpers with spades in case I ever need to have the speakers jumped.

Immediately REMOVE those terrible pins that ProAc provides as jumpers and buy yourself a set of real terminated jumper cables, either spades or bananas, whichever your actual speaker cables aren't. The pins are really crappy and I kept losing mine whenever I switched cables--they just fell out onto the carpet and were lost for hours. I use some Transparent jumpers w/spades, but have also tried some Analysis Plus jumpers w/bananas. Both immensely easier to use and better connections all round. Of course, as others have said, actually biwiring your speakers is another option.

The best termination you can use between the binding posts is a pair of jumpers made from the same speaker cable. If you are using bananas, then obviously, this is not an option. Bottomline, use biwire cables.

I started out using the spade lugs that terminated my speaker wire, but my wire was heavy and stiff, and it had a tendency to loosen easily when bumped or adjusted in a counterclockwise fashion that would loosen the nut. I've stripped nuts on other speakers and am hesitant to really tighten them down a lot. I switched to Monster Cable X-Terminators, a spade-to-banana adaptor that let me use the banana sockets on the Proac nuts. The X-Terminators are designed so that they can be tightened in the socket after insertion. After I moved the speakers to another installation, I switched to bare wire basically as a matter of convenience. I haven't had a corrosion problem, perhaps because our air is pretty dry. I haven't noticed any real difference in the sound with any of these terminations. (Obviously, the change from X-Terminators to bare wire occured as the speakers were moved to an entirely different room, which could easily overwhelm any termination-based differences in sound.)

Since I have mine single wired and use the jumper bar, I can't use spade lugs to attach to the binding posts. I currently have them connected with banana plugs (the Monster variety) which seem to work fine, but have also tried them with bare wire sandwiched between the jumper bar and the post screws. The sound was slightly better using bare wire, but I found that the copper ends corroded fairly quickly and it became an inconvenience to keep them clean, so I switched over to using bananas sealed with heat shrink tubing.

Its interesting that I seemed to notice a difference in sound between using the top and bottom posts, but I suspect that my much of this is probably just in my head. It would be interesting to find out if anyone else has noticed anything similar.

-- Ken