My experiences with the KLEI Classics is the same as several others’ here: they simply are too fragile to use with any long or thick cable, period.
I use a 5m speaker cable pair and have my amp at chest level in a cabinet on the side wall of my living room. They aren’t especially heavy cables at all, yet the connectors sagged visibly very soon after I installed them. Then, two of them broke off when my painter moved the cables further away from the wall to get better access to the wall. While that was unusual stress, I believe the painter when he said he simply moved the cables further out at floor level.
I acknowledge that the connectors were destroyed through human intervention, so promised myself that I would be more careful with the cables. I had them re-terminated with the same plugs because my cable fabricator recommended them so highly. Very quickly, however, maybe within days, the weight of the cables again bent the spades downward.
That scared me, so I sought a more robust solution. When I pulled the cables out of the amp’s binding posts to ship them for re-termination, the KLEI’s had 45 degree bends in them.
I Iost patience at this point and had the cables terminated again, this time with Viborgs. If I am honest, I think the KLEI’s do sound better, by a surprising amount, but they are hideously expensive for such a fragile part. The peace of mind the Viborgs give me is worth the loss of perfection and I appreciated the price difference, as well.
My amp’s binding posts are standard issue WBT’s, so nothing weird there.
Anyone using these should go in with his or her eyes open. More than the usual pre-purchase suitability assessment and, then, care in use are required. (I note that I have had four different 5m cable sets, always banana to spade with several brands of connectors, from no-name to high-end WBT locking posts, in the 30 years that my equipment has been in the same places in the same cabinet in my living room, and I never, ever have had an issue with any other connector at either end of the cables.)
