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).
How does bi-wiring work?
To start, I do bi-wire my main speakers. However, I am somewhat confused about how bi-wiring works given that the speakers have internal crossovers and the signals received by them have the same full frequency range going to both sets of terminals.
I confess that I don't see any difference from single wiring in terms of the speaker's performance. What am I missing?
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I have identical single and shotgun bi-wire versions of the same cable and marginally prefer the shotgun bi-wire so that’s what I use. I attribute the difference to basically doubling the gauge of the cable that significantly reduces resistance. In the end I don’t care why, I just know it sounds better. But, and this is significant, the difference is subtle enough that I’d upgrade all upstream electronics first before I’d consider going to a shotgun bi-wire cable because I think you get potentially bigger improvements there. But, if you feel like you’ve got all that sorted I think bi-wiring is at least worth trying. A more significant improvement occurred when I used banana jumpers in addition to my shotgun bi-wire spade cables. Using both together significantly tightened up the bass and improved imaging and I won’t listen without the jumpers. Don’t know why it works, but it definitely does and a cheap tweak so well worth trying IME. |
@soix , this is probably a stupid question, but what is "shotgun" biwiring? And to clarify--does it matter that the jumpers you used in conjunction with the biwire are bananas? The reason I ask about that is because I still have the (gold plated) jumpers that came with my B&Ws, but they are not bananas, they are contoured strips designed to just fit underneath the speaker terminal nuts, and since they accomplish the same thing, would the bananas actually have a different effect? (I can see where the bananas would be easier to experiment with and use.) |
. . . @soix , I guess this is the answer to my (above) question?
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