User Manual

CABLE THEORY

Page 23

Usually a spade lug is the most effective termination for a speaker cable. A spade can be securely at-

tached to a screw terminal or binding post, or one “leg” can be inserted into a push-to-connect termi-

nal. As long as the spade is made from soft copper, it will deform (become marked) where it connects

to the screw terminal or binding post. These marks show that there was a gas-tight connection.

Unfortunately, the desire for spade lugs to look and feel “fancy” has resulted in the common use of

inferior materials. Most spade lugs are very shiny. This is almost always due to the nickel plating under-

neath the gold. This nickel layer clearly distorts the sound, but it does make the lug look pretty-very im-

portant if you mount them on the wall instead of listening to music through them. All AudioQuest spades,

pins, and bananas are direct plated without any intermediary layer to compromise the performance.

The advantages of gold plating are often misunderstood. Gold is not a very good conductor, and as an

extra layer of material, it distorts the music. The reason for using gold is that it is a “noble” metal-it does

not corrode easily. The only reason for gold on connections is to prevent corrosion. Luckily the distortion

caused by gold is a fairly friendly smearing of the sound, as compared to nickel which causes an obnox-

ious irritation. AudioQuest terminations are available in a choice of thin gold plating (thin for complete

protection with minimal distortion), or with thick silver plating for maximum performance.

In addition to inappropriate plating, the other common problem with spade lugs is the nature of the

base metal. While pure copper is best, many “fancy” spades are often copper alloys harder and stron-

ger than pure copper, but they don’t sound as good.

As an alternative to spade lugs that look better than they sound, AudioQuest makes spade lugs that

sound better than they look.

The standard AudioQuest spade is pure soft copper. It isn’t very thick and it isn’t strong enough for

prying nails. It is direct-gold or direct-silver plated for ideal performance. There is nothing between the

copper and the gold. It sounds great and it doesn’t cost much! What else could you want?

Well, you might want the AudioQuest Premium #P-8 series spades. They are made from LGC, they

are thicker than they need to be (you could pry small nails), and they are direct-gold or direct-silver

plated. These deluxe spades are also the correct size to t into terminal strips, and won’t short-out

your positive and negative binding posts. Silver-plated #P-8 spades are standard on Type 6 and

above.

Good Signals-Bad Signals

This entire pamphlet has discussed ways to pass an electrical signal as clearly as possible with no

ltering. Unfortunately there is often a signal running through your cables that should not be there.

There is a whole category of energy referred to as RFI (Radio Frequency Interference). When RFI

gets into your equipment it compromises the circuit’s performance, and therefore compromises the

sound or picture quality.

Often people assume that if they don’t hear a radio station coming over the CD player, they must not

have any RFI. This is not necessarily true! In order to hear a radio station (without a tuner) you need

to be picking up that particular radio frequency, and you must have some part of your system that

recties the signal (tunes in the signal and converts it to audio frequencies).