I have decided to put new terminals and interior wiring on most of my speakers. The exception is my Mini Utopias, which already have WBT terminals and are single wired. I am willing to take its interior wiring on faith. Most of the rest are Spendors, which , with the exception of my 1/2Es, have rather cheap looking terminals. It appears to use Michell , which I have always liked and have a number left from my days as a dealer. I also have a set of used WBT and a sack of very large pure copper posts whose origin I have forgotten except that it was a good company. I am mainly interested in what wire members would recommend. I had thought silver but high grade copper is a possibility. I can get some AG -18 and AG-23 from DH Labs in pure silver according to their description. They have a good reputation over here but I am open to other sources. Is 18 ga. big enough for the woofer on an S-100 for example or are double runs indicated? Should I solder directly to the post or to spade lugs? Which terminals have you used? Any info helpful.

Here is a link that looks interesting. Has anyone used any of these?

http://www.vhaudio.com/wire.html

Within a cabinet the runs are so short compared with the enormous length of ordinary copper wire on the speaker coils and crossover inductors that it won't make the slightest bit of difference - unless you use some really stupidly thin wire. Especially as within a cabinet you can space the individual cores so far apart that the dielectric is a complete irrelevance.

If I'm fitting new terminals - though I'm not sure why you want to - I wouldn't use any individual terminals, I'd fit a proper speaker connector such as the Speakon range. Much more reliable a contact, extremely low contact resistance and enormous current handling:40A per pole, giving you an 80A rating if you use a 4-pole Speakon with cross-coupled quad speaker wire, and less than 2mohm contact resistance per pole. I don't know what Spendors you have, but the original ones as sold to the BBC would probably have had XLR connectors. Bit puny by today's standard, the Speakon's are much better. I've used these quite a lot for amplifier connections with current ratings far above anything you would use for HiFi audio, and they've proved dead reliable and their contact resistances easily as low their manufacturer's specification.
Using a proper connector like this will also make housework a lot easier as you can simply unplug the speakers while vacuuming etc. If you use the right angle version of the plug (NL4FRX) the wires will be conveniently pointed downwards from the back of the speaker.

No we don't "know" - it is widely believed by HiFI nuts, but except for exceptionally long runs, when put to the test (proper DBT's, not anecdotes) these differences prove to be imaginary. And your statement "The comparison with coils and inductors does not hold as there can be meters and meters of wire in them" had missed the point - that's precisely WHY a few cm extra of nice thick stranded wire will make no more difference - the performance is almost entirely driven by the performance of the wire on the speaker coils, which will vary widely in temperature and hence resistance with the dynamics of the performance. Worrying about a few cm of wire in the cabinet is like trying to speed up a cross country journey of say 100miles on winding single-track roads by adding 100yards of motorway on the end.

But did you compare one cable with another IDENTICAL cable apart from being just 50cm longer? Which is what we're talking about here. There's no argument that if your speaker cables are long enough and have sufficient resistance/inductance/capacitance this might be high enough to be comparable with the driver/crossover parameters, though it has to be pretty poor stuff or extremely long for this to be true. This is why my own set-up does use cross-quad speaker cables, because in my particular listening room they are rather long (over 8m long) and this is an excellent way of keeping the series inductance down and achieving a low series resistance. But to hear the effect of just 50cm of any reasonable cable? And when you say you hear a clear difference between one cable and another, was this done in a proper DBT with no fore-knowledge of which one you were listening to, and repeated enough times to give a statistically meaningful result? Because if not it just joins the general canon of anecdotal evidence, just like that relied on by homeopaths, UFO chasers, MMR-scare believers, etc.

No, I have never heard a difference between the same cables, one 2.5m, the other 3m long. I thought you meant that what you put inside the box did not matter. So I argued that the 50cm inside the box is just as important as the 50cm outside of the box, not meaning to say that one can hear the difference between two cables only differing 50cm in lenght.

Yes I know all the commercial market ones have binding posts, but I have actually used studio versions using XLR's. It's the gradual rise in speaker demands for the professional market that have driven the design of alternatives such as the Speakon connector and some rivals.

And my outlook is not driven just by engineering - if a real difference is heard then the reasons can be found. But the key is "hear" - not "think I hear". Over the years I worked as a speaker designer I found that what I (and customers) THOUGHT we heard was completely different to what we actually heard, being heavily driven by what changes we knew (or thought) had been made, how expensive bits were, the general reputation of the maker/material/construction. Properly designed DBT's soon showed that a lot accepted wisdom was completely wrong and that to find out if genuine improvements were to be made the listening tests have to be properly blinded. Non-blinded customers happily identified the "classic sound of xxxx" where we had in fact long abandoned the particular xxxx (manufacturer, wire type, amplifier etc) in previous models. And these were professional audio (studio and live) users spending the sort of money that the home user could mostly only dream of.

This is NOT subjective versus objective - it's properly conducted subjective versus uncontrolled anecdotal evidence. We all, including myself, like to think we can somehow blot out from our minds what we "know" about a technique/material/model etc, but it just isn't possible. Think of the classic start line to a badly-conducted psychiatrist session: "Don't think of an elephant". And proof that we can identify some genuine differences blind does not validate our judgements in non-blinded situations.

I'm not sure how you do a valid comparison on the voice coil though - can you explain that bit a little more? I guess what I'm getting at is that silver seems a lot heavier than copper, but only slightly less resistive. So if you match resistance, you get a heavier coil, or if you match mass, you can't match resistance? Or are my back of an envelope sums wrong?

Silver isn't a LOT more dense than copper - 10.49 compared with 8.96, and resistivity so near (15.87nohm.m vs 16.78 nohm.m) that the whole exercise is a bit pointless. If you want low resistivity while retaining low weight then aluminium has the best figure of merit (density 2.7, resistivity 28.2 nohm.m), but of course you will need a wider magnetic gap with a larger magnet to retain the same flux density in the gap. Some HF compression drivers do indeed use aluminium voice coils.

Are you saying you remove the binding posts and wire straight from your amplifier to the crossover?

If the binding posts are still there, then your comment doesn't make sense - it makes no difference whatsoever what order the various bits in series are, an extra foot or so of any wire will have exactly the same effect whether it's upstream or downstream of the binding posts. You'd have to turn basic physics on its head to argue otherwise.

Some years back I re-wired my Kef R-107 with Chord Odyssey and Rumour. To be honest at the time I did it as I was using Chord cables, and I believed it would be worthwhile. It was a bit tedious, and not that cheap, the Chord stuff was difficult to work with. I do at times wonder if there is a more flexible better option to replace that Chord with.
In all honesty I thought I heard some improvements, tighter bass and clearer mid, but I wonder if it was more to do with removing internal spade + crossover pin connections and fresh silver solder?

I am not sure I would bother with more than simple quality OFC copper these days, but I am interested in fitting new terminals.

I would like to purchase WBT speaker terminals, the single wire plastic coated ones which used to come on an alloy panel? And possibly replace the XLR socket on the head too?

I would also like to fit WBT amplifier terminals to my Classe CA-100 and Krel KAV-250a.

Just don't seem quite sure which ones I need and where to buy from though?

Still not sure why you would want to do any of this, but the obvious thing to do to replace the XLR is to fit Neutrik Speakon connectors instead - they actually have the same footprint as the XLR and will fit straight on, giving you a 30A rated connector instead of the 15A of the standard XLR.

I'm with zonepress, why on earth would you want to fit WBT terminals instead of the existing ones? WBT is just a make, nothing magic about them. Thye're all just trying to make the best of a bad job - terminal posts are a daft way of doing things, just a hangover from cheap domestic audio when it was important that you could fit any old bit of wire without using any tools. Brute strength is about the only way of getting decent gas-tight joints, and even then they often relax and come loose, or the terminal posts start to rotate in the panel. I think we're stuck with them for the moment for domestic kit, and we'll have to live with the regular inspection and re-tightening they necessitate. The professional field has long abandoned this way of doing things as they want to know that their connections will be extremely low resistance and stay that way: XLR's used to be the favoured way but Speakons seem to be becoming the industry standard, though there are a few other low-resistance solutions around.

Have a look at http://www.neutrik.com/uk/en/audio/203_324141/speakON_Lockable_Loudspeaker_Connector_group.aspx and you will get some idea of just how large the professional market is for decent loudspeaker connectors.

The domestic HiFi market seems adept at shooting itself in the foot- the same happened with low level signals, with the adoption of the phono connector instead of the DIN connector, just to save a few pennies. The instrumentation market has long adopted DIN connectors, usually in their lockable form, as a robust and versatile connector system, with all the usual gender and plating variations. Naim seem to be the only contenders who've stuck to their guns, but they are a very minor part of the market. And professional audio signal levels were standardised way back in the 30's or even earlier, whereas current domestic audio, Hifi or otherwise, comes with a bewildering range of signal levels. Even the TV market has done a better job of standardisation of signal standards.

To be completely fair to high end manufactures it should be pointed out that,at least in the US , products sell for around 10x their production costs. If WBT terminals added $90 to production costs that would add $900 to the selling price. So the present system where those who recognize their value can add them themselves at a considerably lesser cost and the rest can make do with the standard equipment probably works best. My main point was that the designer could see to his satisfaction that the Michell were better just by looking at them , so apparently he shared the view that such things do make a difference.