I recently took out a subwoofer by accidentally plugging in my turntable with the volume up a bit, I had quite a powerful amp on the speakers and I blew the cone completely out of the magnet......
Turn the volume down you say? Of course, but there is always an instance where a distraction or simply a brain fade will allow these things to happen..
Then I remembered I had seen years ago the Neutrik RCA connectors which have the spring loaded earth contact on them....
What happens is earth protrudes out as far as the signal pin, so that when you plug them in the earth contacts first and as the signal pin pushes in, then the earth retracts to allow signal contact.....
I think they they are an ingenious design, and a major and much needed improvement on such an old and otherwise silly design....."signal first, then earth":scratch2: who thought of that?
But its a standard, and good on Neutrik for coming up with a solution.....
They use their famous clutch strain relief, and you get two sizes, on the rest of my interconnects I use "Proco, dynamike" cable (what we use at our sound company) which is fairly large and it fits in there just fine.....
The casing are metal and heavy, extremely well built.....
Heres the connectors on my SME tone arm cables, the smaller clutch grabs those just fine......
Sorry about pic quality, straight off the iPhone....
You can see how far the earth connector sits out.......and in the next pic you can see my lovely girlfriends hand holding the spring loaded earth back....
The connectors are gold plated, and not with just a hairs breath, its a healthy dousing of gold on there......
Next, my goodness there is a very noticeable difference in sound quality, the turntable has a more even sound and a noticeable extended top end range, the "air" for the want of a better expression....
I biamp my system with a DBX 480 processor/crossover and its balanced in and out of course, so I made up all the interconnects with these Neutrik RCA's and Neutrik XLR's with the ProCo cable, and the system is now completely quiet in terms of noise floor, and it brings a noticeable and most welcomed clarity to the music....
Well I highly recommend these connectors, they arent very cheap.....but as the old saying goes, you get what you pay for......