Not as bad as soldering ~ Do some reading. You will discover I'm correct. You are completely misunderstanding the point. It is not "sealed" ~ each strand leaves the solder at some point and there would be no galvanic action as no solder would be present doing it the Jaguar way. ~ See Peter's comments above Post 14>. A fine engineer.

Direct crimping, clamping & ultrasonic welding/fusing of cables all provide superior connections to any form of solder.

Soldering is done because it's cheap in mass production. It creates a problem with every strand it contacts in a multi-stranded cable. 'nuff said. My case is closed on this subject. I could write a thesis on this as others have done. You can Google just as easily as I can for references.

A Direct quote from the OEM Owners Manual of High End components that studies these things.

"high-current cable connectors which provide optimum contact area with speaker cables up to 10 gauge. To prepare cables, strip 1/2" of insulation from the end of the cable. Insert the bare wires into the connector and tighten the setscrew with the Allen wrench provided." There are the above quoted reasons for this. No "tinning" or twisting of cable recommended.

 

I'm going to assume Glyn that the correct solder on a circuit board works because one is dealing with solid wire ends from the given components on the board ?
Even your high-end vacuum tube audio equipment is using solder _ I'm assuming that since I have never seen the inside of a modern tube amp ?

In a power amp driving the speakers, there would be a huge amount of heat being produced from the power transformers and the tubes themselves, so maybe the connections are fused together, like the wires coming from the power transformers ???
Or maybe the wires are fused to terminals inside the transformer, and the outside of the terminal is simply using gold plated screws ?

When I spent a number of years on the HP forums dealing with peoples problems, a huge amount of Pavilion DV6's and I'm sure others, had failed video cards.
It wasn't so much the video cards, but the lead solder that held them to the board, it oxidized from the heat and it let go.
Some of that was poor design where the heat sink tube ran over the processor and then over the video card; it was doing double duty, and very often when serviced, there was no heat-sink compound found.

It was a disaster, NVIDIA was blaming HP for not soldering it correctly and not using the correct flux and the incorrect amount of heat.
HP blamed NVIDIA for using lead solder (small beads of solder were already present on the card) _ I don't know how it was resolved, but there was no recall, you went to HP and you got a new computer.

One of the fixes for the home red-neck was to plug all the vent holes and purposely over heat the circuit board and flowing the solder once more.
No one ever reported if that lasted, YouTube videos are out there for this procedure.

What I'm saying is that solder has a purpose somewhere, whether or not it's a good idea to use it on the distributor is debatable, even with the evidence presented here.
I always solder my home-made spade terminals, the crimp kind get oxidized eventually, creating bad connections, and with only 12 volts present, it doesn't take much to fail.
The trick is to use lead free solder, and resin flux, or even this white flux I have when repairing circuit boards, acid core flux should not be used, I guess it has its uses in copper water pipes.

I find many of the bullet connections soldered by Jaguar on areas of heavy current flow, like the head-light circuits.
Other connections just have the wire poking out of the bullet connector and laid down the side _ those give the most problems.

I think if the proper solder was used, the correct flux and the proper conductive grease, there would be no galvanic corrosion.
Personally I would not solder mine, simply because it makes disassembly a PITA when one wants to put new wires in or if one of the screw housings fail.

EDIT:
This is interesting, I'm a little surprised to see the final boxing of the tubes with his bare hands.

 

EDIT: That's their newish integrated baby in the range. (Preamp & Power amp in one box). They are only showing you the baby end of the plant.

They don't hand solder their top of the range units but they are very complex units with separate Pre-amps. (One on the shelf behind the narrator (old look). They have now merged with Mcintosh. I have been in that plant.

Yes ~ Stuffed boards are low voltage, capacitance, inductance.& resistance. They are run through flow baths to evenly distribute the solder & are generally DC low current. They work well due to this. No HT as with plug leads etc. & no galvanic consequences. Due to this they can run safely for long periods while capacitors are usually the first to give trouble.

Yes there is special solder in large tube amps (Audio Research will not even disclose their formula for the solder they use but will sell it to you to change a Cap or whatever at an outrageous price for about 2 inches). This is why we try to keep them hot for long periods. The only negative to this is that it reduces tube life but they all run silent fans which helps. (not that baby unit above. It depends on convection).

Living right at the coast my speaker cables become half an inch shorter annually due to corrosion on the copper which is not bad (more a dulling of the surface) but a good practice that I have made provision for. The corrosion on copper is slow (especially OFC ~ oxygen free copper but far better than soldering/"tinning" consequences. Hence the example provided above. I don't know of a half decent speaker cable that is not at least OFC.

Why so many cables & critical components are gold or silver plated today. Even in your iPhone. Apple, as one example, have trade in schemes that provide a discount on your new phone if you hand back the old so that they can recover the gold. Have you ever seen a good audio RCA plug that is not gold plated with the female plug like Tiffany, as an example, that is not gold plated.

Many HT Audio cables have each strand gold or silver plated and priced accordingly. Audio Research now offers 2 ranges with different aesthetics.

Free cables provided with some components go straight into the bin. I don't know why they waste their time. With AR you just get a power cable which is top notch. Some captive to reduce number of terminations.

New look Baby intergrated to be fair in comparison



The Traditional look (some with black handles). ~ then you got the tall monsters.
I chose to go with the all black units that were optional but have owned both finishes in the past.

 

Jeff ~ you must be a very interesting man to chat to. From Gigantic clock springs, to reading HP articles in The Absolute Sound, to knowing what a Magneplanar Tympani is. (they ceased production a long while back). I know we have wandered OT again but obvious to you would be that my bare wire quote above is from Jim Winey at Magnepan. He could demonstrate this to you in the early hours of the morning silence in his basement where he did most of his development work. 3M Corp lost a very capable man.

 

One of my old engines colleagues ended up at dCS. I'm not sure if they are exactly a rival of Audio Research as the specialities of the two companies are mainly in different parts of the system. Still, it seems a long way from engine research to high end audio.

 

So were the lubrication of huge clock springs. Electrical current is electrical current. But solder is not just solder. And yes we wandered OT a little.