Having just up-graded to Super Lumina Speaker Cable which was a night and day revelation and has still left my jaw on the floor in awe, it got me thinking about the quality and performance of the Jumper cables which connect the LF and HF terminals when a single cable is used.
I’ve got B&W 804 D2 speakers which have non-descript jumper cables of good quality spades/phono but the sheathing is a little cracked and worn.
I checked out the cost of Super Lumina jumpers and as expected it’s astronomic. So the question is would a set of NAC A5 jumpers (there seems to be a few sets on the big auction site at a reasonable price) be a good way to go?
Or is there a performance benefit in going for more expensive options. An on-line cable company has jumpers made up for:
Van Den Hull The Magnum
Chord Signature
Furatech
Telurium Q Silver
All of the above are about £100 - £200 for a set of 4 cables.
When I had my ATC SMC11s connected with Super Lumina I tried replacing the metal bars with NACA5 and didn’t like it at all. I felt it dragged down the quality of the Super Lumina toward NACA5 level. I eventually used Tellurium Q Black 2 jumpers which I felt were a good compromise although I’ll be honest I didn’t try that many options. Maybe try and borrow these and/or some Chord Signature jumpers from your local dealer. Or if that’s not possible some online retailers offer money-back deals.
Remove a speaker terminal and see if it’s possible to solder a link between the HF and LF temrminals internally. I have a pair of Royd speakers, they where supplied from the factory with a soldered link in place for single wire use. If biwire is required the link is cut.
Also, for some unknown reason you won’t need some fancy expensive cable for internal wiring, any old piece of cable you have lying around will do.
I use Vertere (Pulse X Mini, I think) jumper leads with my SL speaker cables and they were at the time about £125 for a set of 4. They certainly sound far better than the NACA5 jumper leads they replaced.
I agree that the SL jumper leads are a stupid price. It was rumoured that Vertere make (or at least source) the cable for SuperLumina speaker cables. Indeed Naim only assemble these cables, buying in spools of the bare cable. It would therefore appear on face value then that Vertere jumper leads are a good match. They make 3 levels of jumper leads with the Pulse X Mini being the cheapest.
@Adam.Zielinski experimented with a few jumper leads with SL speaker cables and I finally shipped him a set of the Pulse X Mini and he said they were the best of the ones he had tried. I think Adam might have now moved on to SL jumper leads, not sure.
I decided to rewire my SCM11s internally to a single set of speaker terminals. You can either do this by unscrewing the binding posts and attaching the spade connectors for the treble/mid units to a single pair of posts (the easy to return to standard spec way) or do as I did and remove the spade connectors and solder directly to the posts. Not sure how easy this is to do on B&W speakers though
When comparing SL to Chord Epic Reference I had a discussion with my dealer about specifying F configuration at the speaker end of whichever was chosen. I eventually chose Chord, and they duly arrived with the F configuration which works perfectly. Naim would apparently have done the same had I gone for SL. No extra cost was involved with either.
Or replace your speakers with ones that don’t need terminal links: problem solved. This is what i will do with my next speakers upgade. I own Totem Hawks for about 11years , and this was a problem i was thinking about. At first i used an F connection but recently i have the A5 re terminated and i choose not do again F termination having in mind my next speaker upgrade. I currently use 2 pieces of A5 for link plugs and sounds ok.
Getting speaker cables terminated with F terminals at the speaker ends is another option. The problem with this is that, if you change to speakers to a design with a single pair of sockets in the future, then it would advisable to have the speaker cables re-terminated accordingly for the single pair input.
If you have no plans to change speakers then the F termination is a good option.
F connection may be not reusable even if you your change speakers has also twin sockets, distances between sockets not necessary match between different speakers…
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