I use adapters as you mentioned in your opening question in some of my systems and I've not heard a degradation in sound quality.
Spade to banana adapters
Would using spade to banana adapters to my Pathos InPol Heritage cause any degradation in sound quality? I find the WBT adapters on the Heritage awkwardly place with the spade slot at a vey difficult angle. (To be fair I have only awkward access to the back of my rack, which doesn’t help.)
I’m thinking of putting Transparent adapters on my Transparent Reference spades.
T