Rich's Tongfamily (Richtong.net add-on)

Well, I finally got my Onkyo TX-DS989 back from the shop. I shorted out the speaker cables and blew the amplifier sky high. Had to go back to the authorized service center. Anyway, to prevent this in the future, I’m using banana plugs for all my speaker cables. They won’t then just short randomly as I can lock these in. I do lose my bi-wiring as a result unless I can find banana cable y-connectors. That is, something that is a single plug on one side and two recepticles on the other. Pretty hard to find, but searching google, did find some great places to get odd cable bits:
* “Home Grown Cable”:http://www.homegrownaudio.com/index.html. These guys remind me of BetterCables before they got really big. They sell Do-it-yourself banana plugs, but no banana recepticles.
* “Radio Shack”:http://www.radioshack.com/search.asp?cookie%5Ftest=1&find=banana&SRC=1&image1.x=0&image1.y=0. It’s amazing how these guys have survived. Here are all their banana plug accessories. One cool thing they do is real-time inventory into their stores. So, you can see if you want some strange connector that such and such a location has it in stock. They have one model for “stackable”:http://www.radioshack.com/product.asp?catalog%5Fname=CTLG&product%5Fid=274-734 hookups and another “dual”:http://www.radioshack.com/product.asp?catalog%5Fname=CTLG&product%5Fid=278-308 set that might work as well.
* “Audio Gear”:http://www.audiogear.com/Audio-Adapters-Banana-Plugs.html. They have nearly every type of connector to any other connector known to man. Just no banana to two banana’s. They do have stackable banana connectors though, so you can take a bare wire, put it into the connector and then put another banana over on the top of it.