Recommendations for banana plugs for Vista speakers

[Gordon Gray]

Thanks for the input beanbag.

I would still suggest you try making some other jumpers out of the same speaker wire you use, install, and let your ears decide.

Little to lose and perhaps an audible improvement.

GG

 

[InterMechanico]

I used a 4 point technique to measure the contact resistance and internal resistance of one of my "crappy sounding" vista OEM jumpers. I came up with a total value of 350 MICRO-ohms per jumper, including contact resistance thru the speaker wire spades and binding posts. Included in this is an internal resistance (i.e. not including contact resistance thru the surface) of 100-130 MICRO-ohms resistance.

So two jumpers combined have less than 1 MILLI-Ohm of total resistance.

For reference 1 foot of one-way fat 10 gauge wire has 1 milli-ohm of resistance.
The panel crossover electronics have about an ohm or less of resistance put there on purpose.
The woofer section has an inductor (long coil of thin wire) and 4 ohms of wire in the woofer coil.

The jumper resistance will knock down the signal of the unfortunate side of the crossover by some tiny fraction of a percent. This is less than the normal tolerance of the crossover components anyway. It doesn't screw up the phase or create distortion in any other way, so I would only expect an imperceptible reduction in volume. I saw your diagonal jumper post and that would at least even out this degradation to both halves of the crossover. (BTW, the Nordost and Audioquest methods are electrically equivalent)

Perhaps if the jumpers had a softer coating the contact resistance can be reduced. I still doubt it would make a difference in sound quality.

So there ya go. It's an attempt to quantify the effects you are talking about. I think it's constructive and illuminating.

The inherent resistance of a conductor isn't static, though. When you tested the resistance of your jumpers, you did so (I presume) with a DVOM, which pushes a minimal (Very minimal) amount of current through the conductor. In order to get a more accurate representation of the electrical characteristics of the stock jumpers, you would need to measure the voltage drop across the jumper while it is conducting current equivalent to the maximum current that will be supplied by your amplifier. Another test you could perform would require a graphing multimeter, and something to generate a perfect waveform. You could then observe the reproduction of that waveform at the output end of the jumper. You might find afterwards that your results are the same as in your previous tests though, and that wouldn't surprise me.

I'm not a "cables guy" at all. I did build a few sets of speaker cables to experiment with, and they both sounded like poop.lol. Some lengths of standard monster cable sounded much better. I also coated my stock jumpers with silver bearing solder, and I think my sound improved a little, but I was unable to switch back of course, so I can't be sure.



I have since ordered some inexpensive speaker cables and jumpers to try, mainly because I have the same doubts that you have, and I'm curious whether they're well founded or not. It could be that monster cable is as good as it gets, or maybe my sound can be better. The thing is, as much fun as it is to speculate on all the variables, there is only one way to know for sure.

 

[beanbag]

Hi Julian,

The measurement technique I used is described here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-terminal_sensing

It eliminates some of the errors you mentioned. To do the waveform test would require something like a lock-in amplifier with higher harmonic sensing, or the nano-voltmeter, and I don't think I want to drag that back to my living room.

Even though I think the effects of jumpers are small or negligible, the diagonal jumpering mentioned by Gordon is the theoretically right way to go.

For cables, you can get thick cheap stuff from the car audio or welding store. Very easy to look up milli-ohms per foot for the various wire gauges.