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.
I posted a link to an image for bi-wiring. Yes, my cables were the same for each pair. Using the same cables I had for many years, I immediately noted the difference and improvement listening to music I have been very familiar w like Famous Blue Raincoat - Jennifer Warnes Brothers in Arms - Dire Straits That is what compelled me to try newer tech cables like the Shunyata Venoms. I have Venoms for my interconncts. |
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…. |
