Banana plugs?

[Stephen Coates]

I connect my HiFi speakers up with Banana plugs. The amplifier ends have DIN plugs on though.

I use the generic ones from Rapid/RS/CPC/whoever; the same ones I use for multimeters, bench power supplies, etc.

I'd suggest getting the ones with screw terminals though rather than solderable ones. If you wish to solder them, you will need a rather powerful soldering iron as a 4mm banana plug is quite a big lump of metal and will suck the heat right out of the iron.

[Kin Hell]

Display Port has a higher bandwidth. - We got this after HDMI on PC's....

And don't forget Thunderbolt from the Mac's..... We got that on PC's too....

Maybe Thunderbolt could become a universal standard eventually.

[Harrison]

HDMI is pretty good for most situations. Newest version 2.1 supports 48Gbps bandwidth and 12bit colour. Displayport 1.4 is 32Gbps and 10 bit colour. And Thunderbolt is 40Gbps.

I do still use DP on PC because my GPU didn't have enough of one or type for 3 displays. So 2 are DVI and one is DP.

But the best solution for PCs is single port multimonitor daisy chaining support. That way you only need one cable going between each. At the moment that's only supported by dDsplayport and Thunderbolt, but there's no reason it couldn't work with HDMI. It of the 2 thunderbolt is the easier solution as you just string them together, but eh DP you need monitors with DP in and out ports.

I can't see any reason to use Thunderbolt unless you need multimonitor daisychainng support.

The other issue is Apple are the only one mainly using Thunderbolt. For that reason HDMI and USB C will remain the standard moving forward. There is thr ability to use USB C for video too, but that's limited to 10Gbps so 60hz 4k maximum.

[J T]

I always though banana plugs would be a nice way to set things up, especially if you are moving house often (like I was as a student).

But I never, ever bothered to actually get any, and probably never will.

[Harrison]

Same here. Always thought about it, but never got around to getting any. Just screwing down the wires. But I'm finalising my study finally and have added speaker wiring terminals in the walls so the wiring is running under the floor to wall sockets, and I'm therfore thinking of using them now. It's a bit overkill in a way, but I've always been annoyed at having so many cables running around rooms. So as I already had the floor up as I have rewired the whole room to add a lot more wall sockets and ethernet ports I thought I might as well add speaker wiring too.