Grip It Good

It’s hard to get excited about cable press conferences, especially given how much of the hype compares less-than-favorably with actual snake oil, but sometimes you come across something so simple, yet so effective, you have to wonder why everyone else isn’t doing it.

In the case of Straight Wire’s new Push Prong RCA termination, the reason everyone else isn’t doing is the small matter of a patent—Straight Wire president Steven Hill’s first in over a decade—but you can rest assured that every custom-installation-oriented cable company will be doing their best to come up with a RCA termination solution this quick, easy, and reusable ASAP.

Hill asks me to terminate my own RCA cable right after the Straight Wire press conference. It takes less than half the time it generally takes me to stick a banana plug on the end of a speaker cable and involves nary a drop of solder. Three prongs pierce straight into the cable jacket and hold tight. I then screw the back end of the plug in place with a few twists and I’m done. “Now pull,” he says. And I do. With all my weight. The connection holds tight.

Hill then clips the standard 23 gauge coaxial cable a few inches back, removes the Push Prong RCA in the blink of an eye, and makes a new termination just as beautiful and rock-solid as the last.

“What do you think?” he asks.

“What do you want me to say, Steven? It works and there’s no gimmick,” is the best I can come up with on the spot.

“That’s exactly what I wanted to hear,” he says with a grin.

Price: $4 per plug
Contact: StraightWire.com