Doubling a Set of Speaker Cables

I have been using my DIY solid silver .9999 speaker cables. It is made up of multiple various gauges sleeved individually in there own teflon tubes.

Another Audiogonner wanted me to try a set of copper foil speaker cables which he raved about. When I did, I gotta say that I was not too impressed. It lacked bass and the upper frequencies. The music had no life.
(I must add that I also felt the same about the Silversmith Fidelium’s cables even though so many have raved about them.)

It could be that I am using tube mono blocks and this type of ribbon cables just don’t work well with this equipment. You know, impedance, inductance thing. I donna know, I just didn’t like the sound.

On a lark, I then tried both sets of the speaker cables together. That is; the solid silver and the copper foil... And I must tell you this combo worked great! The sum is better than the individual cables. Way better image solidarity and the frequency extremes are awesome. Just a pleasure to listen to.

Don’t dismiss something before you try it, you just never know.

ozzy

It made day and night difference for me for my passive subwoofer.  The internal amp on my decade old PSB subsonic 6i subwoofer died.  I was using a radio shack PA250 amp to drive the sub.  Initially, I used a two feet long 18 gauge speaker wire to connect.  The sound was recessed.  Then, I used a three feet 14 gauge speaker wire.  The bass was immediately fully.  I was able to use some bass testing sound on youtube to measure the difference.  Then I picked up a long contractor grade extension cord from my neighbor's trash bin.  I cut a pair of three feet long, and striped three wire (black, green, white) on each end, and combine with a mono price Open Screw Type banana plugs.  Then the subwoofer made another day and night difference in extension and output.
Doubling speaker wire works well for any speaker can produce decent sound below 100Hz or all subwoofers.  For most stand mount speakers, the difference may not be heard by human ears. 

I have done a lot of experimenting with speaker cables in my system and in every case I have found running two sets of speaker wires improves sound noticeably. I have tried copper bar jumpers that come with speakers, copper wire jumpers, and silver wire jumpers and nothing sounds as good as running one set of wires to the high frequency terminals and one to the low frequency terminals. My theory (and it checks out with my listening tests) is that when one set of cables is used, whichever terminals it connects to will get extra current. Or at least it will have that apparent effect on sound. For a couple of years I bi-amped my speakers because of the noticeable improvement and sound quality. It took me a while to figure out that it was the second set of wires, not the second amplifier that was improving the sound. So now it’s one amp, two sets of wires for me. In my case I use Clear Day solid silver speaker wires, so a lot of detail is getting to my speakers. In my opinion when people say bi-wiring or for that matter high quality cables in general don’t make any difference, I politely say I think it’s a case of your ears or your equipment not being up to the task that is required to notice the difference

@milkdudd : exactly my findings and my experience over many years!

I also use one amp (two speaker taps, A and B, but can also bridge the single tap) using two speaker wire runs, one to HF and one to LF ports in my speakers. I will never go back to jumpers + single run speaker wire.

It's the total combined gauge that counts.