Ensuring you have a solid connection between your speaker wire and its post is a key to strong, consistent sound. Depending on your preference, you may choose to use bare wire, banana plugs or spades. Although not difficult, sometimes it’s the simple things that can be tricky. Today we would like to show you how to connect a spade to your speaker wire.
To complete the job, all you will need is your speaker wire (check out our blog on gauges), a stripper, and your speaker spade.
1. Carefully make a cut approximately 5 cm between the two twisted wires, splitting them into two separate cables.
2. Strip approximately 2-3 cm of the protective sheath from the wire. This will expose the copper wire within, making it ready for an electrical connection.
3. Remove the base from the tip of the spade. (Some styles twist, others slide off)
4. Insert the wire through the base of the spade.
5. Position the spade over the end of the speaker wire.
If your spade is like the one we have pictured here, you will need to crimp the end closed to make sure it is fitted firmly around the wire.
6. Bring the base up to meet the spade head.
As mentioned before, some will meet when screwed, where as here, we simply slide the base up to meet the spade head, giving it a neat presentation.
7. Now you can connect your spade to the speaker post.
8. Unwind the post cap slightly.
9. Position the spade (horseshoe shape) around the post.
This image depicts one spade connection (black). You will need to attach a spade to the second side of the speaker wire (red), as these will be your positive and negative connections.
(TIP: Selby speaker wire comes with a white stripe down one side, therefore if you select this side to be connected to black spades, continuing to do this consistently will ensure you correctly attach positive and negative wires to the appropriate posts.)
10. Screw the post cap back until you have a nice firm connection.
(Note: Don’t forget by using equal red and black spades, you will always have the visual reminder to connect black to black and red to red – which means positive to positive and negative to negative. It doesn’t matter which you decide to use for either, but once you start, make sure you stick to it, otherwise your speakers will be “Out of Phase”)
