Banana plugs are copper connections that are designed for terminating speaker wire. They offer a couple of benefits over bare wire in terms of connecting the speaker wire to the inputs of your home audio system. I will examine these benefits as well as talk over some of the widespread myths about banana plugs in the following lines.

A huge benefit that banana plugs provide over plain bare speaker wire in the termination point may be the extra convenience. Bare wire can be a inconvenience because you have to make sure the wire strands are together as stray strands of copper wire can potentially be a difficulty in the future such as shorting out your system. It can become an inconvenience if you need to cautiously insert and connect the bare wire two times for each speaker. By having banana plugs placed on the ends of the speaker wire, all you'll have to do is plug in the wire just like you would with any other cable. You can accomplish this in a few seconds.

Bare wire can also create problems by corroding. Once a bare wire has corroded, you will hear apparent cracking or noise on the signal. Banana plugs can prevent this from happening since they are protected from corrosion. Since most banana plugs are gold plated, the copper is protected so you will not have to worry about the negative problems that exposed copper wire can bring. 

The most obvious benefit that banana plugs offer is that they give you a professional looking installation of to your audio system. In many instances where only bare speaker wire is used, the result is sloppy - especially if they are used with banana wall plates. So if you are looking for a nicer looking result to the install your speaker system, you should consider banana plugs. 

Banana plugs do not improve the performance of the audio. Just like any copper, even a coat hanger can send out audio signal. Nonetheless, in the event you wear out the bare wire strands on the speaker wire by neglecting to use banana plugs, you may have noticeable problems with sound quality. Should this happen, you will need to clip off the corroded wire and re-install the fresh wire to the terminal.

The most significant downside of neglecting to use using banana plugs and simply using bare wire may be the possibility of damaging your system with cross termination of stray wire strands.

It is a good idea to get screw-type banana plugs since they're the easiest to install. No soldering is necessary with screw-type banana plugs.. All that you simply must do is insert the bare wire in the plug and screw the plug together clamping the bare wire on the inside. 

In conclusion, banana plugs are just a fantastic approach to protect and add quality to your installation too as convenience. And also, since they can be found for just a few dollars online, you'd be missing out by excluding them in your installation.