How does bi-wiring work?

wrong….. but

 to extract the full impact of a true biwire your speakers need be properly configured with a separate set of mid / high binding posts AND you must use what is called an external biwire speaker cable AND if at all possible physically separate he bass cable from the mid / high cable ( this is why an internally biwire cable is 90 ineffective. The physics are well understood…. pass current thru a wire and create a expanding and collapsing magnetic field . This field in turn modulates the mid / high signal. 4” matters. lots of good engineers with ears can hear it. I have a nice set of shotgun external biwire cables that i loan out for this express purpose…they have about 50 K fedex miles on them…. your milage…. may vary….

@jmeyers  , your question interests me as well.  I have an ancient (30 year old) pair of B&W 805 (the Matrix seies) that are set up for bi-wiring, so back in the days when I was making a lot of money, I did bi-wire them.  I have a real tough time with A/Bs, plus I am lazy and would rather listen than test and experiment, so I have never tried comparing how I feel about bi-wire versus single wire with supplied jumpers.

With all that typed, if you were to plug in "bi-wiring" or "biwiring" as a serch engine up in the "search discussions" box at the top of the page, a bunch of hits will come up.  I know, because I did that about 40 minutes ago.  Some answers were that bi-wiring makes no difference and some people gave technical explanations of why bi-wiring is a good thing on speakers that are set up to be bi-wired.  Unfortunately (for me), I do not have a great mind for undertsanding that type of technical theory, so it mostly left me blank.

But maybe try your own A/B comparison and/or do the search of the site I described, and see if any of the explanations make more sense to you than they did for me.

(1) I’ve not experienced any bi-wiring performance improvements in my systems, and I’m in the “best-you-can-get single wire + jumpers” camp.

NOTE: bi-amping is a different story.

(2) However, others express different positive results in their systems. So here is the “diagonal bi-wiring” option to test out for yourself.

“ … Diagonal bi-wiring connects the red speaker cable to the bass/mid post and the black cable to the treble post. Then jumpers connect bass to treble in the usual fashion. I tested this arrangement out of curiosity and the results were pleasantly surprising…”

https://www.nordost.com/downloads/multiLanguage/NorseJumperinstructions_new.pdf

Each to his own …. Carry on.

It was cheap and easy for me to try. and thought it might offer some benefit, so I did it. Never compared single wire since. At worst, I doubled the wire gauge and added minor wire cost....at best, it sounds wonderful so I leave it as-is and enjoy the hell out of it. 😎

+1, @knotscott  , that is kind of the way I look at it.