banana plugs , myth , magic ,medicine ?

ok , i cant sleep.
banana plugs.
do they acually improve the sound quality?
or do they just change the sound quality?
the way i see it , if you have a signal comming from your amp to your speakers the best way to provide an uninterupted path is to hard wire , the problem being , no one really wants to dismantle their hi fi in order to do this , i certianly wouldent.
so the closest we can get is bare wire on terminals right?
so why put another step into the signal path by including a banana plug?
some might say that the speaker cable will oxidise thus creating a bad connection, surely not if you screw the terminal down hard enough i wouldent , perhaps on the parts of the wire that werent touching the terminals but where the wire touches the terminal surely that wouldent oxadise would it?
and wouldent sufficiant regular cleaning solve the problem anyway?
i know that some manufacturers terminate speaker cable with air tight plugs but wouldent it be a safer bet just to gold plate the ends of the speaker wire it self?

so , whats your views on banana plugs?


cheers,

Rob.

 

They work just fine.

 

Indeed hard-wiring would be the "ideal", but it's not practical.

Next step is bare-wiring to the terminals, but that, as you've observed, will cause oxidation over time, and the terminals will come loose with time and the quality of the connection will decrease.

Banana plugs and spades add yet more convenience as compared with bare wire, and the quality of connection that can be obtained is very good. Perhaps not quite as good as a brand new bare-wire connection, but much more consistent over time.

 

After some thought, my educated guess is the best connection would is get your soldering iron out and hard wire the cables directly to the crossover circuit.

Reading the BBC website this morning found their report on an article in Nature also interesting. One further step to understand the hearing mechanism. Good to watch future developments. Maybe the further inprovement we seek are not among the few short banna plugs but in some proteins.

http://www.hhmi.org/news/coreydp.html

http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaP...journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nature03066_fs.html

 

I recently swapped Naim for Eichmann bananas and it was an improvement and not just a change in sound.

 

Errr... so what was the improvement other than a change in sound . You think they look nicer?

 

Nah, one bit less Naim in Hermann's equipment list :duck: .

My preference is for spades; soldered to the cable.

 

Simply cleaner details and focus The Eichmann showed the details better. Even in the background of sound the Eichman gave slightly more focus. It wasnt a dramatical improvement but worth to keep it and worth the price.

Looking nicer????? They are behind speakers!

@voodoo,
well yeah thats true. Just a pre, a tuner and prefix. Things moving on......

 

I know; they also don't look too brilliant IMO! The improvements you described above is still sound though (since you heard it)...

 

You telling me more details and better focus is improvment in sound?

When I play very well known records and listen things I didnt noticed that way before of cource you can say the sound has changed but you can say its more music too. Its a kind of definition.

Well thats up to you. I got more music out of my system and thats count.

 

Well yes. I wasn't meaning to be picky BTW, your first post did sound rather funny . If you hear it, it's sound, end of story. I could understand differentiating between music and soundstaging issues, which appears to be what you were doing, but both are aspects of the sound.

 

I prefer spades at the amp end, assuming you have a nicely put together amp that is, and bananas at the speaker end, got to be a high quality material employed, crap metal can't be a good thing.

 

The better quality and purer the conductor the better a signal travels - as bananas or spades are the last link in this signal path it is ludicrous not to ensure that they are of the best quality possible.

 

Not quite. You'd want to ensure they're good enough not to cause any significant degradation, but it's not necessary to ensure they're "the best quality possible". Of course, exactly how good is "good enough" will vary considerably from person to person depending on all sorts of things.

 

If you want the best, i think wolfgang hoit the nails head.

 

Hi,

Have a glass of a nice Merlot.

Actually, they worsen the sound quality, a lot, as do spade connectors. The main source of distortion are the "High End" binding posts though.

If you could still have the classic Naim Style Plastic 4mm Sockets with minimal Metal Inserts and use the version that uses hard goldplated copper contacts and combine that with these skinny hollow Banana Plugs used by Nordost among others (around £ 1 each) things would sound a lot better.

Sort of. If you cut a small (slot) opening into the back of your Amplifiers (and speakers) you could use suitably insulated flat silver tape (remember, silver oxide is sonically quite benign) to carry the signal to the outside of the Amplifier. If you then simply punch a suitably large hole into the silver you can place it directly over the stub of the Binding post.

You can then make flat silver tape speaker cables where the ends are basically formed into "spade" type connectors by folding the tape over and cutting a suitable "U" shaped slot.

If you make sure to clean the silver surface well and then apply a thin layer of fairly thick consistencysilicon oil on the silver you get a good protection from oxidisation and the biding post is only used to clamp the two layers of silver onto each other.

I find this and variations on the theme to be the best choice allowing ease of use and high sound quality.

I find that even using copper the same principle works quite well, AS LONG as you seal the surfaces of the copper strips well against air and tin in the moth etheric way the bare parts, using silver & copper bearing solder.

Something like that. Bare copper oxidises quickly. COpepr Oxide used to be used to make rectifiers.

If copper is exposed to oxygen it will oxidise. Copper oxide (like rust) can "creep" into places supposedly not exposed to oxygen.

Sure. Sufficient may be in the region of maybe 20minutes to no more than 24 Hours between cleaning though.

Sure, but plating is a non-trivial process and if you want to sell cable by the running meter you would have to plate the entire wire. Just plating the exposed end with gold would give rise to some interresting issues.

Ciao T