Electra Tube Connectors and GR Research Speaker Update Kits

One of the differences is support from GR and the GR community.

Second you get Danny's improvement. I'm sure there are better ways to do things. At his price point and the improvement he offers, is it worth it to you? He already did the testing and made mods that work.

The question is do you think it's out of the goodness of his heart? Or do you think he should get paid for improving YOUR speakers..

As far as the tube connectors. Binding post are always better. Pure red copper studs, red copper nuts and washers.  Red copper with mill spec pure silver clad studs, washers and nuts with mill spec silver the same way.. Pure silver studs nuts and washers. Yes they cost a few bucks.
You get what you pay for...

Danny has a preference for "No Rez". For practical purposes and selling kits. NO Rez has a neatness to it.. and an all-in-one solution too. It is a good product..

I like sound coat and black hole. I use course fiberglass for bass. I use sound coat and highland wool for mids. My tweeters are either dipole or enclosed so the housing just needs an opening, no dampening..

Regards

Great post @oldhvymec

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The question is do you think it's out of the goodness of his heart? Or do you think he should get paid for improving YOUR speakers

Excellent post. Thanks from a retired business owner. 

I'm using tube connectors on my GR-Research speakers. I've also used them on a few of my DIY amplifiers in addition to traditional binding posts. 

I can't say that I've heard any significant improvement comparing tube connectors to high quality binding posts, but I also don't think they are any worse, and are certainly an improvement over cheap binding posts. They are also considerably less expensive than high quality binding posts. 

The disadvantage of the tube connectors is that you are giving up some flexibility. The female connectors work ok with banana plugs, but obviously can't accept spades. Another disadvantage is that they don't hold as tightly as spades or locking bananas, so if your speaker cables get jostled at all, the chances of them getting disconnected is much higher.

I have some speaker cables with the male tube connectors, and in this case, I could definitely hear a bit more detail and image focus with the cables plugged into the female tube connectors compared to plugging them into the binding posts, but I think the compatibility here is not optimal.

I have not tried comparing the exact same speaker cable with male/female tube connector connections vs high-quality spades and binding posts, but my guess is that the difference would be minimal. Others have reported a noticeable improvement using the tube connectors (Ron from New Record Day, several members on Audio Circle), but I don't know the quality of the connectors they are comparing to.

So my (current) conclusion here is that these connectors provide a high quality connection (as good as a high quality binding post) for a significantly lower cost, but you give up some flexibility. If you've already got good quality binding posts on your speakers, I wouldn't recommend changing them. 

Regarding the value of Danny's kits, I think @oldhvymec summed it up well. I will add that I've been very impressed with the NX-Otica speakers I built from Danny's kit and I believe he delivers excellent value in his products in general. He also provides a great deal of free support to the DIY community, so I try to reciprocate by purchasing from GR-Research when I can.

And as @oldhvymec said, the No-Rez is a well designed, easy to use dampening product. There are cheaper ways to accomplish this, but this is a pretty foolproof product that provides excellent results. 

I have build a couple of kits from Danny and modified a few more speakers I have owned and put the tube connectors on them. I have one set of Audio envy speaker cables with the designated male ends, but as said above, bananas will work. If you decide to go the G.R.Research route, You should invest in the tube connectors, if nothing else,  to see if you hear any difference. 

What's up it's me, I am also visiting this website daily, this website is really pleasant and the viewers are really sharing good thoughts.

I have dealt with Danny, he is a nice honest guy that truly cares about helping you improve your sound. I have one of his monitors with sonicaps, mills resistors and foil inductors. 

I had a pair of towers sitting in a closet I wanted to sell or try to make them sound better. I sent Danny the crossover and he sent me Sonicaps, Mills, wire and inductors. It did improve the speaker. Though I did end up removing the sonicaps in the tweeter section and put in Clarity Cap CMR’s and Path resistors. That was a large improvement over the sonicap but at a much higher cost but well worth it. Much more clarity and refined no regrets on that one.


You may want to do a little research on tube connectors. I read some people have had issues with them coming unplugged. I  was scared to blow my amp which has happened before but with banana plugs coming loose. I almost tried the tube connectors to replace some Cardas copper post thinking maybe all that copper maybe over kill. I ended up soldering my speaker wire to bare wire coming out of crossover but my crossover is external so easy accces. 

Has anyone compared tube connectors to good quality binding posts and noticed a sonic difference ?

I did my B&W 606 S2 with the upgrade kit, as well as adding No-Rez instead of the polyfill. The end result was definitely a significant upgrade. I am very happy with the kit. The little B&Ws are bi-wireable. So, I kept one of the posts and swapped one for the tube connectors.

When you are holding the binding post and spade and holding the tube connector, it just seems so clear it's a better connector. So many less 'connections' in the connection. The binding posts look fancier.

In my case, the tube connectors made a noticeable difference, but my gut is telling me it was getting rid of the low end spades I had on my cables. I have the ability to go back and test again later, but the end result, the kit fixed much of what I criticized about the B&Ws and took them to another level. For ref, this is a desktop setup, I have 803Ds on tube kit in my main system. 

I recommend the GR-R kits and the tube connectors. Definitely worth giving them a chance in my opinion.  

Thanks for the responses but after looking long and hard at the mods, I'm definitely not doing the Tube connectors or the No Rez.  Updating the caps, and resistors and not altering the speaker's response in any way.  I have three or four different high quality binding posts that I will use.