Bananas rule, spades drool. End of discussion.

I've had only one connection ever get totally loose and it involved a spade connection.  I currently run banana jacks.  That one time was pretty funny because I totally missed what happened and my travails involved an incredible coincidence.  I almost never fiddle around with my system so I would never expect a loose connection.  I do move my interconnect from my speaker amp to my headphone amp when I want to listen to headphones.  On this one occasion, I forgot to switch the interconnect back to the main speaker and I turned on the mono bloc speaker amps.  When I noticed this error I turned the amps off and made a quick switch and I did not wait before turning the mono blocs back on.  I saw a flash in the rectifier of the right side amp, and then no music from the right speaker.  I turned the amp off, and not wanting to risk any further damage, I took the amp (Audio Note Kageki) to my local dealer.  At the dealership the amp worked flawlessly.  I brought it home, hooked it up and it didn't work.  That was when I actually tried to diagnose the problem as not involving the amp.  It turned out that one of the spades to the right speaker was loose, but because it was fitted into one of those modern binding posts with a plastic hood to protect people from exposed wire, the speaker cable hung in place as though it was connected.  The odds of the wire slipping off just before I saw the unrelated rectifier flash was extremely small, yet it happened and threw me off.

With you on this one.  Bananas are much more convenient  to install with our ever increasing cable sizes.  Especially with how close makers design their speaker posts so darn close together.  Give us some space guys.  No matter how tight you tighten smooth gold, copper, silver or rhodium spades they tend to want to spin risking a potential contact with a neighbor. I cracked a speaker post base trying to keep spades from spinning.  Haven’t suffered SQ using bananas that I can notice.

+1 @erik_squires totally agree. I used to be a bare wire advocate but after going to banana connectors I’m a believer. 

@larryi had a tube related experience where I was moving my amp around installing speaker cables fussing with close binding posts with spades.  Fired up my amp and tube preamp all was good.  Added isolation springs under my amp and my right channel had a slight noise and went silent.  Moved amp and  checked speaker post and spades had spun and were touching.  Checked all cables and interconnects and couldn’t get the channel back = thought I blew the channel.  Arranged to have it sent to mfg to repair and right before I was going to send  it I thought let me check my preamp tubes.  Turns out one of my brand new NOS 6SN7 tubes failed without noise exactly when I was adding my iso springs.  What are the odds on that…surprised me and lesson learned.

I also like bananas specifically the WBT Type are what i use due to being able to tighten them.

Spades are a pain to connect and to keep tight. Lets not even get into the fact there is no standard size so its a hit or miss if they will fit on your application. we all know how equipment manufactures like to use various sizes because they can.  How many of you have stuck one of the legs of a spade into the hole of the binding post because it would not fit around the stud? 

Bare wire has always given me issues in most 5 way type binding posts anyway, The bare wire is in a guillotine and if you over tighten they sheer off the wire or bend, kink the wire strands. This is not an ideal connection and also loosens quickly and causes issue to the bare wire, Also bare wire corrodes and you loose connectivity there over time. Obviously this happens to all metal connectors regardless of type but the individual wire strands have far more surface area then tined or with a connector.

yup agree bananas are the ones I prefer.