April 27, 2014

  • AudioQuest F-14, Part 2

    Nowadays, you can go into any electronics store, and find affordable speaker cables (usually from Monster Cable or AudioQuest) already terminated with spades. Thus, there's no need for dealers to carry spools of speaker wire.

    But in the early 90s, that wasn't the case. In those days, the general public didn't "believe" that speaker cables made any difference. Thus, there wasn't a market for fancy, already-terminated speaker cables. Everyone merely went to an electronics or hardware store, and had some cable cut from a spool.

    In April 1990, I received the Adcom GFA-535, whose locking posts only accepted bare wire. I already had the original Monster Cable, but its angled pins did not fit into the Adcom's posts. Yes, stereo stores had spools of Monster Cable speaker wires. But I wanted something different, something better than Monster Cable. AudioQuest's F-14 not only was the perfect fit for my Adcom GFA-535, at $0.79/foot, it was affordable. I had the dealer cut me two 8' strips. 16 x $0.79 = $12.64, which was only 65 cents more than an on-sale CD!
    IMG_0722
    Unlike a host of other spooled speaker cables, the F-14 was marked off in 1-foot increments. In order to make use of the cut-from-the-spool F-14, you needed a wire stripper/cutter tool. First, split the F-14 down the middle, creating two legs (one for positive, one for negative). For each leg, use the wire stripper to remove maybe 3/4" of white material. This will expose the two copper conductors. Now twist the two copper conductors together. For a stereo pair, you'll have to do this a total of 8 times.
    IMG_0718
    Yes, over time, the bare copper leads will oxidize. Yes, you could have crimped or soldered some banana plugs or spade lugs. But c'mon, even the cheapest spades or bananas were $2 each. 8 were needed for a stereo pair. For cable lengths under 10-feet, the cost of the connectors would have been more than the F-14 itself! At 79 cents per foot, the F-14 was only meant to be used as "raw wire," frequently into those awful spring-loaded, push-in-and-close terminals.