2. speakers
  3. 146938-115924

Mini-Rant: Human Fingers

I don't have a huge range of experience in this matter but in my limited experience the experience is universal:

My fingers are too large to comfortably use most speaker binding posts easily. It is always tight and tedious. Yes, my hands are big but not unusually so. No, I'm not a clumsy oaf. Quite experienced doing small delicate work in fact. This experience has bridged hi-fi to mid-fi to low-fi.

I can understand this with small or bookshelf sized speakers. But my experience is with tower speakers. I just wonder if there is a reason for this? 

My experience is similar with components. Even my amp which is a huge 100 pound deal with virtually nothing on the back but two balanced inputs and 4 binding posts. The binding positive and negative posts are very close together and hard to tighten for that reason.

Anyway, rant over. Just wondering if there is a reason for not putting enough space between binding posts to get human fingers all the way around them? 
n80
jetter
1,035 posts
 
n80 thanks for the picture, now I got you on the hex nuts and as an aside I guess live a sheltered audio life and cannot believe how thick your speaker cables are to the connectors.  Mine are that thick except about 6 or 8 inches from the connector they taper down to be protective but with a much thinner and flexible insulation.
onhwy61's avatar
onhwy61
4,163 posts
 
Unless someone is in some way physically disabled, I just can't take the "problem" seriously.  Is this an elaborate joke?
n80 OP
1,227 posts
 
@onhwy61 Well, it isn't an elaborate joke.

But in a way it probably is humorous because it might just be my take on things. I work on a lot of stuff. Cars, tractors, plumbing, carpentry....as often as I can, if something needs to be fixed, fabricated or built I do it myself.

That being the case I get exposed to both objects and the tools to fix them that are well designed and a joy to use/work on. That makes my day.

On the other hand, most stuff and many, many tools are simply poorly designed. And what's worse is that better design in so many cases would cost absolutely nothing extra in either resources or function. So I appreciate good design and have little patience or regard for poor design.

In this case I can cite three different tower speakers at three different performance levels and all of them are tedious to hook up. 

Someone above said the tight spacing is necessary to avoid stronger EM. I don't know if that is valid or not. Seems a bit of a stretch. Others suggested the design was for the manufacturers benefit. That might be true too. But for $5000 and up speakers I'd expect the manufacturer to think about the customer a little. Another suggestion was that this is just the way it has always been done. That is the most plausible explanation and the saddest one.

No, this is not a weighty issue. But it seems like it is one that could go away entirely if one designer had the sense to recognize that he could make something better, very easily.
n80 OP
1,227 posts
 
@jetter It sounds like your cables were more thoughtfully designed. Like I say, the actual wire gauge looks to be 8-10 AWG. The rubber covering it is loose around it and much larger around which seems unnecessary since for part of that stretch the wire is actually exposed.

I’ve seen these cables for sale used for over $1000. If I were spending that much right now (god forbid) I’d be looking for something better designed.
More to discover