800 owners, are you using spades or bananas?
 

Hi;

I'm curious to know what most are using as their speaker cable connector, bananas or spades for connecting to their 800s, be that D1, D2, S, etc.?

I have bananas right now and they work just fine because my SC is slim and flexible with little weight however when I upgrade cables they are going to be much thicker thus heavier and I'm wondering if I need to be concerned if I continue to use straight bananas rather than switch to spades or angled bananas due to the vertical nature of the terminals. This only applies to the800's as the 802 terminals are on an angle and the other speakers in the range the terminals are more or less horizontal.

Thanks

I know what you mean. As my wife and I emerge from a lengthy renovation, I began re-assembling my main system with new AQ Oak bi-wires with bananas. Connecting them to the 800D2s was difficult because the "channel" array of the cables is LF+, HF+, LF-, HF- while the terminal array on the 800 is LF+, HF+, HF-, LF-. This means twisting the pigtails and stretching them to span the well-separated terminals. Otherwise, works fine.

Thanks Kal, I actually completely forgot about how far apart the wires need to spread if connecting to the outer terminals. I have been pondering the idea of getting bi-wired cables which depending on my cable choice could pose a problem.

Spades on two separate AQ cables per 800 Diamond speaker (i.e. full range biwiring).
My monoblocks provide for two pairs of speaker output terminals in parallel.
So there is one connector per spade on the amp side as well as on the speaker side.

My main motivation in changing speaker cables was to move from spades to bananas. The spade connections have served fine and were my original preference. However, as someone who changes/swaps equipment more often than most, I finally decided that a tool-free, less twiddly connecter will make my life easier.

Is there really that much of a difference between spades and bananas?

For straight bananas yes, at least that's my theory and why I posed the question. If the cables are very heavy the tendency would be for gravity to pull downward against the speaker terminals which may put unnecessary stress on the the terminals which might lead to damage over time to either the terminal or the banana connector. The stress would be much less with angled bananas.

Spades attach at the base of the terminal and would exert very little to no force on the terminal.

For me, there certainly is.

spades but I do not have 800s

What would be the reasoning?