Everything Does Seem To Matter


Everything does seem to matter.

I purchased the Townshend Fractal F-1 speaker cables and have been impressed with them. Thanks to millercarbon. BTW, I compared them to many other speaker cables including the “hotly reviewed” Silversmith Fidelium’s.

I had them made unterminated because I thought I already had some very good lockable banana plugs to use. The bananas were the stackable kind and look very similar to the Furutech Fp-202 design. I have always preferred bananas because of the ease of connection. I know, I know, bare wire is the best but it is just too crappy looking, IMHO that is.

So, I don’t really know why, but I just decided to replace them with some WBT-0681 AG spades that I also had on hand. Once connected up, to my surprise, the bass became deeper, the treble more extended, along with a more solid sounding soundstage, and, it seems to be playing louder at the same volume settings? Huh? How can this be?

I was happy with the sound quality of the F-1 cables using the bananas for all this time, I just can’t believe that this much sound quality was left behind.

We use high quality wire, even silver only to terminate them with some cheap brass connectors. So, don’t ignore the last end of the connection.

Still some questions I have:

· Was the Banana’s sound quality inferior because of the use of cheaper metal, or perhaps thinner contact points?

· Do spades generally make better contact than bananas?

· Or, is the WBT design just superior in design.

Everything does seem to matter.

ozzy


128x128ozzy
Do spades generally make better contact than bananas?

Factually, yeah they do… but it is just as likely that there is a psychological bias.
The capacitance/inductance may be slightly colouring the sound differently (maybe less now).
Ideally you could have a before/after plot.
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gas tight low mass spade cold welded….

Clean 1x a year on the day u replace batts in all those fancy big $ remotes…..
Everything that everyone wants you to waste money on matters. To the inexperience things that look better and/or cost more sound better. 
You can save piles of money not falling for this. Then you get to spend it on better speakers or getting your room analyzed. The stuff that really counts.
There are great values out there but there are no cheap paths to the absolute sound. 

@ozzy,
Yeah, everything matters.
Better connections. Better materials. Better cables. It all matters. Even if it is a small improvement, you make enough small improvements and all of a sudden you have a large improvement. What it’s worth to you monetarily and investment (time-wise) is up to you. But it ALL matters in how your system sounds.

Fight the good fight and enjoy.


"Cheap metal will never help. Now try them bare!"
 Agree! No harm to try bare wire  and can always return to the spade connectors if preferred. 
Charles 
Any connection, whether banana , spade or bare wire suffers from oxidation. Contact enhancers such as madscientist, Acoustic Revive, NP1260 et al make a huge difference simply by fighting oxidation and increasing contact surface. I am actually agnostic as to the best termination but got religion on contact enhancers.
Thanks for the props. Interesting story. Actually there’s a couple things interesting about it, beginning with your ordering your F1 un-terminated. Because you are right, every little thing does matter. So it is interesting you prefer F1 to Fidelium, even with your bananas. Which now with WBT spades even better still.

I’m old-school and have always gone spades on speaker cables. The only exception being my Townshend Super tweeters which I had done banana in order to be able to connect/disconnect without disturbing the spades on the Moabs. Bananas to me have always been about convenience more than anything else.

But you are definitely right, every little thing does matter. Which makes it hard to answer your questions. Certainly the metal matters. But hard to know for sure which way that one goes. Spades do make better contact, at least when nice and tight. But that is only one part of the equation. There is also the way they are connected at the other end. Did you use the same crimp? Same solder? Those things matter too.

Then there are things like eddy currents, in which case even the shape matters and in that case you could be right about the WBT design.

This is why designers and manufacturers earn their money. It is easy to swap something like this and hear a difference. Figuring out exactly where that difference came from and why, that is the hard part.
Man, most of you guys are way ahead of me on this stuff, but from what I've heard and experienced, this stuff matters. I really DO think you might be able to tune/tailor a system via cables, fuses, and treatments. 

Man, most of you guys are way ahead of me on this stuff, but from what I’ve heard and experienced, this stuff matters. I really DO think you might be able to tune/tailor a system via cables, fuses, and treatments.
The EE types usually design filters with capacitance, inductance and resistance.
(I have only heard a few proclaim that different metals have different sounds.)

If the cables had a different capacitance, inductance or resistance, then a reason exists why it could sound different. And the more secure spades also have a demonstrable reason.
However using higher or lower values in any of those (C/I/R) could be better or it could be worse.
It is not always an improvement.

The accoutsics engineers also say that diffusion and absortion change reflected sounds.
And both of ^these^ disciplines are taught in science departments at many universities “around” the world.\

There are also psychology departments, which is a science as well.

Thank you all for the comments thus far.
At this time, I am only using the WBT Ag spades at the speaker end and the WBT Cu at the amp end. I have ordered 4 more of the 0681 Ag for the amp end.

After careful review (with a magnifying glass), I can’t tell what type of metal is used in the bananas. It looks to be silvery but I am pretty sure it is not silver. I do remember that one of the banana ends broke off fairly easy and needed to be replaced.

I would like to try just a bare connection, but I am hesitant because the unterminated end has a very short length, and some binding posts while clamping down the wire can actually shear off some wire.

So, the termination is just as important as the wire that is used, is it not? We should try to match the wire with the best connector (spade) as best as possible. Anything less will degrade the sound quality of the wire.

That is, in the textbook of ozzy...

ozzy
I once had a nice pair of Acoustat IVs and swapped the binding posts out for WBT posts. Got an improvement there for sure. I swapped out the stock binding posts on my last two pairs of speakers with Cardas copper binding posts. Nice improvements there too. Highly recommended.

Frank
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Thanks for sharing that Frank. It is funny that we spend so much money on auxiliary things but overlook the most critical connection.

That being said, I think that most cable manufactures try to support their design with the proper connector.
At least I hope so.

ozzy