Is Speaker Termination Required?

He's right. I clipped my highend connectors off my LAT International cables and they sounded much better.

Depending upon what material your cables are made of corrosion can become a serious issue with unterminated cables. Also there are some cable designs that cannot be used without some form of termination.

I agree that some spades/banana plugs, etc. can have a negative effect on sonics, but I don't believe that one can make a blanket statement about all termination being negative. In the better designed cables whatever effect the termination has seems to be part and parcel of the cables overall sound. There are no absolutes on issues like these.

Just be careful when using unterminated multi-strand cables.

Whenever you add a termination connector to a cable, you add another connection that requires electrons to jump from one material to another. That increases the likelihood of resistance due to a change of metal types, physical separation and corrosion impeding the connection.

However, this is true for the internals of electronics as well as for speaker wires. Pull the top of your amp and you'll see dozens, if not hundreds, of soldered or crimped wire connections plus components soldered to circuit boards.

Solder is usually tin/lead or tin/silver or other metals. Therefore, even on a circuit board you have a change of materials between the component lead and the circuit board copper foil.

So on a theoretical basis, it is a valid idea to use unterminated bare wire on your speaker connections.

In the real world, one has to ask if, for example, 201 connections are significantly worse than 200.

At least speaker cable has easy access making it no problem to frequently check for corrosion and to tighten and clean them.

You might want to try it both ways in your own system and see if you prefer one over the other.

Me? I don't find it makes a difference as long as your terminations and connections are appropriately sized, clean and tight.