I was fortunate enough to recently find a pretty pristine pair of 846A's and after a long road trip from their original owners, they arrived last week. I spent a thoroughly enjoyable weekend swapping in and out a couple of turntables and preamps to see what these speakers can do and came away amazed at how great a soundstage they throw and how much more detail these speakers put out relative to my existing speakers. I've been enjoying playing different music genres in both LPs and CD formats and the 846A's are definitely going to be keepers.

The only thing I wish they had were binding posts that permit larger spades or bananas to be used instead of smaller sized spades. I normally use Cardas Golden Reference speaker cables in my set up, but since the 846A binding posts did not permit the larger Cardas spades, I ended up pressing into service a pair of Monster Cables that had been relegated long ago to the back of the closet. The Valencia's sounded great even with these slightly oxidized (read green-tinged) cables! I did a topic search but did not find any posts specific to this model. My goal is to be able to run these speakers using both Cardas GR cables with their 1/4" spades and Auditorium 23 speaker cables with banana plugs that I will purchase eventually. Would greatly appreciate your thoughts on which binding posts are of a material and build-quality/configuration that would compliment these speakers?

I don't anticipate ever selling them, but I imagine their value would change if they are not NOS? Would you change out the back board and replace it with a similar board cut to accomodate the new binding posts and retain the old back board to be able to restore it to its original state, or would you do surgery to the existing back board?

Thanks in advance and Happy Listening.