Biwiring make any sense?


I am on the verge of adding new floor standers to my setup as my room has enlarged.  Options being considered are KEF R7 Metas and PSAudio Aspen FR10's.  Both have biwireable terminals, the KEF has a jumper switch  and the PS has jumper wires to bridge the terminals.  The other option from dealing with the jumpers is to biwire the speakers.  In this case I could run a banana and a spade off each output terminal.  Is this even worth considering?  Biamping is not something I'm interested in, as I already am running off an integrated amp.  I had a pair of BassZillas before, each one of which had 3 sets of terminals, the top 2 being biwired, but that's a different deal (I don't have those cables anymore).  Speaker comments would be welcome too.  Amp is PSAudio Spectral Strata w/150 watts into 4 ohms.

128x128howardlee

I saw your link, @84xfirez-51 , and that was what I based my reply on.  I am pretty sure I understand what you reconfigured your biwire to.

If your speaker’s crossover design and terminals are true biwiring, yes biwiring helps. But the value decreases with increase in amp power. That means, if your amps not very powerful wrt speakers, biwiring will be very useful. The audible gains are high. E.g A low power 30 watt class A amp to drive a regular 88db speaker will love biwiring. But if your amp is a 200 watter, for the same speaker the audible gains are much lower. 
 

Richard Vandersteen has nicely experimented and explained the reason biwiring works (only in true biwirable speakers). He said the bass frequencies typically ride on the outer layer of the speaker wire and highs ride in the inner layers. In a speaker with strong bass and lot of driver excursion the bass signals are very strong and they interfere with mids and highs signal riding in the cable. That cause muddying of highs and mids. Hence biwire cleans it up. The better the amp controls the speaker, the more controlled the signals ride in the wire too

I have personally experimented and found this to be true. 

Pani,

My experience w bi-wiring would concur w Vandersteen’s description. The bass very much became more controlled and defined(tighter) while detail in the midrange was more distinct and defined. Got better soundstage and imaging as well. And I say this w my Superamps being 1k solid state. However they are not portable space heaters. 
 

immathewj,

The link to the graphic was just to illustrate one of the sources I used for configuring a bi-wire setup. Picture is a worth a thousand….

Those of you who say "if the speaker is set up properly for it", do you realize that on a circuit diagram biwire looks exactly like single wire?

@phusis ... but ultimately I prefer using similar amps top to bottom actively (class A/B solid state as is), which is to say all the way down into the subs region to aid overall coherency and tonal imprinting.

Tonality is very much founded in conjunction with the lower octaves, the extent of which actually surprised me, and the problem with shifts in tonal balance using different amps is potentially exacerbated with a combination of very different amp topologies/principles...

I completely agree if we are discussing vertical bi-amping, where one amp powers one speaker and the second amp powers the other; in this case, the amps would need to be matched to achieve the best performance.

In my case of horizontal bi-amping, which I believe is the context here, I was fortunate that the low-wattage class A amp I use for the tweeters has good synergy with the speakers. Although the class A amp lacks gain control, both the class A/B and D amps I’ve used for the woofers have gain controls, allowing me to fine-tune the loudness until tonal balance between the high and low ends is achieved. I’m pleased with the sound, though I believe this experience might be dependent on the specific speakers and amplifiers used, making it difficult to generalize.