How does bi-wiring work?

@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.

It doesn’t work any different than non bi-wired. From an electrical engineering standpoint, the amplifier terminal and the two speaker terminals are the exact same node. The only advantage IMO of bi-wiring is that the sonic signature of a speaker can be customized by inserting resistors between the the high and low terminals. This adds additional nodes between the amp and the crossovers and changes the filter parameters (that is, it's designed that way -- you shouldn't do that yourself).