Categories: Blogs & Little Things

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

Del City

John E. Johnson, Jr.

Editor-in-Chief Emeritus. John E. Johnson, Jr. founded Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity in 1994, shortly after publishing a hardcopy book of the same title. He served as Editor-in-Chief of Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity until 2022. John has been involved in audio and video for more than 50 years, having built radio transmitters, amplifiers, turntables, and speakers from scratch. He was also one of the founders of the Northern California Audio Video Association, now The Bay Area Audio Society. John holds four university degrees, including a Ph.D. in Neuroscience, and has published numerous scientific books, along with dozens of scientific articles on biomedical research topics as well as imaging technology. He was the founder and Editor-in-Chief of two medical/scientific journals for 20 years. John holds several patents, including one on high resolution image analysis and one on a surgical instrument. He has been affiliated with NASA, The National Institutes of Health, The Johns Hopkins University, Stanford Research Institute, and The University of California at Berkeley. He is President of the consulting firm Scientific Design and Information, Inc., which is based in Redwood City, California. John resides in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife and multiple kitties! His daughter, Cynthia, who was an integral part of SECRETS for many years, resides in San Francisco.