Hello all. I recently picked up, on clearance, some Boston Acoustics CR95 tower speakers from Tweeter, Etc. I do not yet have a receiver--will be saving up for that and hopefully can buy within a couple of months. While I love surround, I think I'll be sticking with stereo. Mostly because I can't afford it, and also, my particular living room isn't laid out in any way to be conducive to 5.1 or 6.1, even close to "properly."
(I was looking at the Onkyo HT-S760 HTiB but got the towers instead, for that reason.)

A few days ago I picked up 16' of speaker cable from Home Depot, in 12-gauge. $4.50, got to love that. As I had good rapport with one of Boston's representatives via Email a few months ago, I wrote to him about connectors.

"Bare wire will yield the best signal," was essentially the answer. "Not pretty," but best.
Makes sense, I suppose, but I want to ask a few things about hookup.

Now, granted, the instructions may help me through all of this, but since the towers are still boxed up, and a receiver's still a pipe dream, I thought I'd lay out my game plan with you fine people. Is there a certain length of cable that should be exposed? For example, 1/2" or 1" or....? Do you just wrap it around the post, then screw it down?
I guess I'm just looking for the most professional method to hook all this up.

For those curious, I got 16' of cable as I'd read--somewhere on this or another forum--that you need 8' of cable for nominal performance. True or not, that's fine, it gives me spare if I ever need it. Thanks for the help!! Oh, and I'm open to suggestions on $300ish stereo receivers. Currently looking at Denon and Yamaha models at Tweeter, but I'm also being swayed sometimes towards amps. (Problem there is no AM/FM....)

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