Gold coated brass speaker spades

There are no set rules on this sort of thing.  There are many good sounding and bad sounding examples of all sort of connectors and the binding posts.  A speaker builder in my area who makes custom amps and speakers, some ultra expensive, looks for some very old (and cheap looking) binding posts that are made, I believe, of brass.  They turn out to be not that cheap because the community of small builders know about them and bid up the price.  He has some customers insist on better looking binding posts, in which case he uses the likes of WBT silver binding posts.

Brass might be cheaper than copper, but, do we really know that it is bad for sound or that it is a bad choice to do cost cutting on the choice of spades vs. cost cutting elsewhere?  Presumably, only the very top models of these companies represent no cost cutting/no compromises in the execution.  

Certain assumptions are being used to justify finding brass or any other material inferior without the assumptions being supported.  Is conductivity the deciding factor in what sounds good?  Is it necessarily the case that a material that that reduces conductivity or in any other aspect alters the signal necessarily bad for the sound?  So much is being made about the particular connector's, or for that matter the cable itself, physical properties under the assumption that there is a set of properties which, if optimized, will always result in superior sound.  It does not work that way because each system is different and each listener has sound preferences that may mean different alterations to the signal will either be desired or deleterious. 

Does it matter if Tara uses gold plated brass?  Yes and no.  If it alters the sound as compared to some other choice, it matters but one cannot say for the better or worse on a universal basis.  If it doesn't alter the sound in any system, then cheaper or more durable is desirable.

i don't care what material is used for the connectors in my cable (Audio Note silver wire); I care about the sound of the cable as a whole.  I looked it up because of this thread and found out that my banana terminated cables utilize silver over what I will call "mystery metal" (the description is only that it is non-magnetic material) for the connectors.

A local dealer had an unhappy customer come in with cables the customer bought on the internet which he thought sounded crappy.  I heard it and it was indeed crappy, particularly surprising because the cables were supposedly ultra expensive Audio Note Sogon cables.  When the terminations were cut off to look at the actual wire, it was NOT the right internals.  The wires were pretty nice looking fakes with genuine Audio Note spades on them.  Were they Chinese fakes?  I don't know the origin, but, Chinese fakes are getting impressively hard to detect visually.  I saw a line stage supposedly made with Western Electric parts where all the parts turned out to be fake (it did not sound good). 

A dealer/builder I know was looking for some Western Electric input transformers to make a high-end clone of their 133 amp.  A Chinese source was offering a pair for $10,000.  This is the going rate of those transformers.  It may have been genuine, but, it may just be the case of the fakers getting wise--don't sell your fakes at deep discount, that only raises suspicions; sell it at the going rate and make even more money.

I've seen fake tubes, fake cables, fake capacitors, fake transformers, and stuff to help you make your own fakes, like company decals.