If the connectors on a supposedly high quality speaker won't make good
contact with ordinary 12 gauge stranded wire, then its an indictment of
either the speaker or the person making the connection.

Are you suggesting the later as these JMLab's are nice speakers.

Hint, many spekers have a hole drilled through the binding post, and if you
put the bare wire through that and crank the nut down, you're stylin'.

ok, that gets my vote. thanks. Since I didn't say, I didn't actually
pick up the speakers yet (next week) but wanted to stay ahead of the
game.

The most likely problem with directly connecting stranded speaker wire to
the speaker is shorting by stray strands of wire.

I generally don't like arcing. Then again, I work with linear
accelerators and those arcs can jump a meter and then some. Now if I
can only take a magnetron and turn it into a stereo amplifier. grin

thanks for the pun intended input.
Gerald