Ultimately all are a compromise and you have to choose the least worst option. My soldering is good and I trust it. I can get a good quick seal on tinning right cup to the sheath before it melts.
I have tried crimping on my current cables using the Atlas factory prepared crimp. As a connection, I concede it is excellent. But after the first 4 years, the copper (which is always exposed a mm or so on crimping) is brown. They’ll have to be redone every 4 years cutting off 10-15cm of cable each time. Not only that, but the plugs aren’t reusable. I’ll probably go back to soldering. Get more like 10-15 years between needing to be reterminated; and the plugs are reusable.
Well the best method is crimp and then cover the joint in solder. So the solder is acting as a protector not as a conductor. You still have the potential issue of galvanic effect but the resulting joint is the most secure, stable, and electrically sound.
Solder can’t be that bad, when you look inside the boxes and see how much of the stuff there is in the signal path. I understand your point, but by that logic, this 552 must sound pretty dreadful!
Agreed and, tbh I always take comments with a pinch of salt about how exotic the copper/silver/whatever is in such-n-such interconnect or speaker cable when, at the end of the day, it’s going over soldered connections or copper tracks on a PCB.
Just bought the deltrons with crimp, screw and possibly soldered as well so a tri posotive to make a superb connector. I will be using them for a number of grounding cables into earth pin on specially made plugs to take 4mm bananas.
The deltrons can also take a 4mm2 viablue gold plated crimp which are 17mm long so giving a very large amount of contact area in the internal area of the banana. This can be secured with the screw and then crimped just to give extra solid connection too. Ill probably just solder the pure copper though as solder lasts for donkeys years.
Using some IPA to clean the strands after stripping the insulation off NAC A5 and then using some good old fashioned Multicore Crystal 505 60/40 tin/lead solder, combined with top notch soldering skills, will yield far more reliable and consistent results than any other method in my experience. Just plug in and not worry about a thing for years to come.
