[Joe Frances]

Two questions if I may being a "Rip van Winkle" audiophile 20 years out of the game:

(1)  With the Silk Monitors, do they perform just as well with the grills on as off?  and

(2)  For speaker cables does it make any difference if one uses spades or banana plugs with the Silks?

Thanks,

Joe

[jsalk]

Two questions if I may being a "Rip van Winkle" audiophile 20 years out of the game:

(1)  With the Silk Monitors, do they perform just as well with the grills on as off?  and

There is no such thing as an "acoustically transparent" grill.  Even the grill frame produces artifacts that can be seen in measurements.  Can you hear them?  Perhaps not.

For casual listening, there is no problem using grills.  For critical listening, you can certainly use grills.  But in this case, even though the differences are subtle, we recommend removing them for the best performance.

(2)  For speaker cables does it make any difference if one uses spades or banana plugs with the Silks?

Thanks,

Joe

It makes no difference at all sound-wise. Some people love spades, but I have found that banana plugs are far easier to work with and don't tend to come loose over time.

- Jim

[desertrider]

Joe-

I dont have Silk Monitors, but rather Song3's, but *to my ears* the highs especially and a bit on the mids the sound is much cleaner with the grills off.

[DMurphy]

I think the short answer is that if you enjoy the Silks with the grills off, you'll like them with the grills on.  As Jim points out, you can see the impact of grills in measurements.  But most of this is caused by reflections off of the grill frame members.  Those have far less sonic impact than dips and peaks that are inherent in driver response or crossover implementation.  Just play out a little mind experiment.  If you place two vertical wood dowels to each side of a speaker and measure, you will see a disturbance in the response.  But do you really think you would hear that?  If your eyes were closed, do you think you would be able to tell whether the dowels were there or not?  I doubt it.   To the extent that the grill cloth absorbs some high frequencies, there might be a slight softening in the sound.  But compared with all of the other ways things can go wrong in speaker design, this is a really minor issue.