Bananas rule, spades drool. End of discussion.

Cardas not only makes absolutely excellent connectors, they are super nice people to deal with.  I absolutely support their work.  Still, you shouldn't need a super fancy Cardas spade connector to get reliable. 

I mean, sure, there are amps with Cardas or Mundorf or some other high end socket for spades, and they're great at their cost.  For the rest of us though, da banana is da bomb-a.

except da bomb sounds worse than a gas tight low mass spade with a quality binding post, better yet ring terminals….

I like bananas and rice krispies for breakfast!!!!

The absolute best it to hard wire everything, no cable ends or connectors, even wire the speaker lead directly to the speaker wires, just support them really well.

Obviously this is not a good option for most and I do not do all of it though I might someday just to see if I can tell a difference, which I suspect will be so.

The less stuff in the chain the more pure the signal simply has to be and properly done crimp connections can be better than soldered ones, less to go through as they are basically welded together.

Rick

I vote for regular bananas.  I was using spades for decades between amp and speakers and once in awhile one of the speaker wires would come loose and fall off my amplifier. Recently I finally discovered the reason I was having problems.  It was because there are different sizes of spades and I didn’t have the right size for my binding posts.  The spades were too big with the result that when I tightened down on them there wasn’t much spade real estate to clamp down on.  I’m not really fond of the locking bananas that seem so popular these days and that’s what I wanted to avoid.  Why?  To illustrate, a friend gave me a Sony AVR just a couple of weeks ago and he  helped me install it.  He was the one that tightened the locking bananas.  I decided against keeping the AVR and could not open the locking bananas.  The spacing of the binding posts was very close and I couldn’t get a good grip on them with either my fingers or any tool for the same reason, the right spacing.   I had to wait days before a handy male showed up who was stronger than I am and he was finally able to loosen them.  So I will repeat myself to say I prefer regular bananas.