will
|
Hey Laurence,
Several thing occur to me.
If you like to use spades, solder is probably already part of your sound. So if you have soldering skills (or know someone who is skilled with soldering) you could pick up a nice replacements and change them. My favorite solder these days is Johnson's 4.7% silver and 1.7 copper from partsconnexion. It is a little harder to use (especially for a big connection like this, I use a little Cardas flux with it and a solder gun), but it sounds great.
Or, depending on how much they need to be bigger, if the spades are lighter weight and pure copper with silver plate, or silver, and softish, it may be possible to carefully spread them out and then flattened them, just wide enough to work with your binding posts ??? Have to be careful to use tools that do not mar/scratch the surface, and finally get the surface flat for best contact. They might look a little funny if this worked, but work better if you can get them around the post.
Or, as Chris suggests, you could use a straight wire connection. Cut off the spades as close as possible to the spade edge, and strip and twist.
I solder my cable ends because I like the convenience of connectors, but probably more, because I use several different wire types and sizes to make my speaker cables, some pretty fragile. For a wire end, to me, soldered raw wire does not sound as good as raw wire, though it does stabilize and protect the wire. Like Chris, getting back to raw wire is chosen by many as the best. If you chose to cut the spades off, with many wires, you may get into some sort of tedious wire stripping, leaving enough clean wire to allow twisting into one bundle, and long enough to insert into the binding posts. But all you would need is a knife for carefully getting off shrink wrap, wire cutting pliers and insulation stripper pliers.
I agree on using a conditioner too. Especially with raw wire connections, but all over, I like contact conditioner. A favorite is Cardas, pretty easy to get and not much money for the little bottle, and a good cleaner and conditioner...works and sounds good. I changed to it after using Deoxit Gold for years. The Gold is good, but I found it dulled the sound if not sort of buffed/polished with a cotton cloth pretty immediately after putting it on.
Recently I tried Madscientist graphene contact enhancer, and it is really good sounding...better signal all around.
|