Little Things: Converting Speaker Cables from Banana Plugs to Spade Lugs and Vice Versa

Do you have speaker cables with banana plugs and wish you had spade lugs so you could have a tighter bond between the cable terminations and the binding posts?

I have several sets of Wireworld speaker cables in my reference rooms, and all of them have (had) banana plug terminations.

When I added a pair of MartinLogan CLX electrostatic speakers, I noticed that getting the banana plugs into the binding posts was very difficult, as the binding posts are recessed (see photo below). The Wireworld cables are very thick, and I had to bend them very sharply to get the banana plugs to go vertically into the holes in the binding posts.

In the MartinLogan center channel speaker, the banana plugs would not stay put. They continually just came out of the end of the binding post.

On the amplifier side, the bananas were fine. They went straight into the binding posts, which ares very tight, so they were held firmly in place.

So, I needed spade lugs on one end of the cable and bananas on the other.

Fortunately, Wireworld terminations are interchangeable, using a threaded base, as shown in the photo below.

I unscrewed the banana plugs on the speaker end and screwed in the spades. I had to bend them slightly so that they would fit into the binding post at near 45⁰. You can see that the cable is no longer bent at a sharp angle, relieving stress on the entire connection configuration.

Now you are thinking, “That’s fine, but my cables don’t have interchangeable terminations.”

Well, don’t worry, there are banana/spade adapters from several companies out there that you can use. They have the spade at one end, and a tubular section at the other end into which you would normally insert the stripped copper conductor of your cable and solder it. The tube on some of them will fit a banana plug, so you just bend the spade at a 45⁰ – 90⁰ angle, mount the spade, and plug in the banana. For others, you can pry the tube open using a screw driver, so that it fits the banana plug.

Spade Lugs on E-Bay

KC Electronic Distributors

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