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.
Vice-grips on your binding posts? Really? Must do wonders for resale. AudioQuest makes a great hand wrench that fits both terminal sizes. For my speaker cable, prefer bananas on the amplifier end as I need to swap + and - for a phase reversal. Spades on the speaker end is all Wilson will accept. However, the silver spades on the big Wireworld Platinum cable are soft and sometimes break off when moving the speakers around. Keep a bag of replacements. Oh the problems of affluence. |
@coppy777 , I just did a quick google on those and found a picture on AA. Unfortunately, my B&W binding posts do not have hex heads, they are round heads with I guess what would be referred to as knurls on them. I am a retired mechanic, so I have an excess of sockets and wrenches, and if they did have hex heads that would make my life a lot easier; as it is I use a pair of small channel locks to give them a tweak with after I hand tighten them. I assume that B&W did not use hex heads because they felt that folks would be smoking them down and stripping them out. |
@coppy777 , here is a picture of kind of what mine look like. I did the search for that AQ wrench you mentioned because I was thinking that maybe it was machined to match those (what I am referring to as) knurls that B&W used on my binding posts. I guess I could replace them with better posts (like maybe Cardas?) but one of my fatal flaws is probably laziness, and once I have the spades attached and satisfactorily torqued, it's kind of like "out of site/out of mind." As I typed earlier, however, on the rare occsions that I do have to mess with them, I always wish that they did have hex heads. I guess I could by a set of eight (I am biwired) Cardas(?) posts with hex-heads, and next time I have to remove the speaker wire spades I guess I could then change them . . . I guess I could do that. . . .
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