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  3. 169952-41

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
coralkong's avatar
coralkong
639 posts
 

@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.


charles1dad's avatar
charles1dad
10,249 posts
 
"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 
antigrunge2
1,397 posts
 
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.
millercarbon's avatar
millercarbon
12,531 posts
 
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.
coralkong's avatar
coralkong
639 posts
 
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. 

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