Much appreciated Eppie. Yeah, the manual was what got me doubting in the first place. The diagram and no mention of spades. And like you guessed, my cables are way too expensive to mess with (not to mention I have zero experience in terminating cables). I'm thinking a spade-to-banana adapters might be the way to go. We'll see.
It's very simple to swap terminations. Just snip the spades off, strip some of the insulation back and install some bananas. The good ones come with dual set screws so all you need is a little flathead screwdriver.
That said, I don't know what cables you have but maybe you could contact the company and see if they'll do it for you. As in send them in and have them put new terminations on them. If I owned those I'd shop for some fancy bananas and do it myself, or just buy a spool of good, pure copper 14 or 12g cord from Monoprice and make my own. You really shouldn't spend much for cables. They make claims that simply are not backed by science. They rely on expectation bias and "burn in" to sell their product. Gene has tested a few exotic cables here and found some of them actually performed measurably worse than regular ol' copper cables.