Since I bought my 50 year old vintage McIntosh MC240 amplifier I've been thinking about how best to connect speaker cables to it. Given that the Macs back then used terminal strips instead of binding posts, it's a bit of a challenge to attach modern speaker cables like the bi-wire Panatela for Tannoy Westminster Royal SE owners (which are bi-wired with a separate ground to the driver - five cables per side in all).

 With my Tannoys, the Mac is the best sounding tube amplifier I've tried with it so far, which is saying something, because I've tried a lot of tube amplifiers with them. To be sure, the Mac gives up some performance to the amazing ASR Emitter II Version Blue amplifier, which I expected, but it's nearly the match of the ASR in creating an emotional connection to the music, and even betters the ASR in a couple of aspects of musical and sonic attributes, which I didn't expect.

The MC240's combination of audiophile-style sonic abilities, its prowess in portraying musical attributes of music, and its ability to provide a strong emotional connection to the music, is so keenly balanced that I have decided to adopt it as my 'new' reference amplifier instead of just my 'vintage reference' as I was planning.

I tried a temporary method of taking some extra binding posts I had left over from the Duelund-WRSE Project and using them as clamps for the speaker cables, then running a wire from the cables to the terminal strips. That actually sounded pretty good, but it's not really a suitable long term solution. (above)

As I was searching for spade adapters for terminal strips I came across some adapters on eBay that I thought I'd give a try. (above) The price is certainly right, as they're less than $10 USD for a set of four.

One end of the adapter slides into the Mac's terminal strips and the other end sticks up so you can slip on spades, or at least that's the idea. You can also slip a banana connecter into the end of it. There's also a partial hole through them (it doesn't go all the way through) that you can insert a wire end into it.

It turns out that the shoulder on the binding post is too narrow to get a good grip on the Panatela's spade connector, so they tend to slip off. However, I was able to slip one end of the prong from each of the bi-wire spades into the hole of the adapter and then snug the binding post bolt down on it. The end of the binding post bolt accepts a banana connector so that works great for the Tannoy's ground wires.

You can see the result above. I like the idea of these connectors, and with some improvements they could be really handy for vintage amp owners. First of all they need to be all copper and to lose the plating. Secondly they need a more robust binding post nut with bigger shoulders to hold the spades securely. Thirdly the hole to accept wire should go all the way through so you can insert a wire all the way through.

So while these adapters make for a reasonable temporary fix, they're not really suitable for the long term, so I am going to keep looking for a better solution. They're not as good sounding as the binding post clamp plus wire to the terminal strip method either.

If any of you know of a better way to go about this sort of thing be sure to let me know.

Thanks for stopping by!