90% of our customers buy a pair of leads to connect the left and right speakers to the outputs of their stereo amplifier. First we'll discuss this and then discuss what the other 10% buy.

Speaker cables come in two types, usually a cable has two wires within it, one for the +ve and one for the -ve.

Since cable is sold by the metre the first thing you need to decide is how many metres are required. First rule is to make them both the same length even if one speaker is nearer to the amplifier than the other. If you are going for a single wire cable you will need double the amount.

Once you have decided on the length the next decision is what plugs you require. There are three mains types:

• 4mm banana plug (easily the commonest)
• BFA plug( now an EEC safety requirement for new equipment)
• Spade plug (these come in different sizes so you will need to know what size you require, standard is 4mm)
• Bare wire (no plug at all, avoid this if you can but you may have no choice)

On our site you need to decide how many metres of cable you require in total and buy this. Some of the cables are sold already terminated by the manufacturer (e.g. Nordost) But sometimes this is not the case and you then need to decide whether you want us to make the cable up for you (this is the most popular option). You buy the terminations you require within the Terminations section of the catalogue

Some loudspeakers are designed to accept seperate connections to the bass and treble parts of the speaker. This enables each speaker cable to concentrate of it's particular job.

If you only have stereo amplifier (with a left and right output) you require a special type of termination. This has four plugs at the amplifier end as usual, but coming out of these plugs are 8 wire speaker cables with 8 plugs at the other end.

Manufacturers make cable specially for this purpose. They are different in two ways:

• They have 4 wires instead of 2 to make this option neater
• Sometimes 2 of the wires will be designed for treble and the other 2 optimised for bass

You can buy the bi-wire terminations option in the spkr terminations section.

Some lucky souls will have a device called a crossover which splits the music into a high and low frequencies, each of these is sent to its own power amplifier. This type of system only works with bi-wireable speakers. . One set connects one amplifier to the treble inputs on the speakers and the other set connect to the bass inputs.

Bi-Amping cable are similar to Bi-Wire except they have 8 plugs at both end of the cable.

Again this option is available in the spkr terminations section.