Has biwire speaker cabling become "old" ?

I had a conversation with John Dunlavy a few years ago on this very topic. His position was that the only way a second set of cables would be of any value is if they had the exact electrical characteristics as the first. Since this is hard if not impossible to achieve, it would be much better to spend the extra money on better first run cables. Even then he was very skeptical about high price exotic cables that made claims that could not be empirically measured.

I don't get your post. You're using biwire speaker cables in your own system. What's your opinion on the matter? Do you hear any differences?

I"m with Z on this one. Every designer is different. My Proacs all sounded better bi wired, but ONLY when using the same wire for all the runs. My new Vandersteen's have to be bi wired. He's designed them that way and he'll even tell you that you are better off running less expensive cable to bi wire than get an expensive single cable for one connection.

This is one of those times that it makes sense to find a dealer you trust and who knows your system do you can listen to the difference in their store or they can loan you cables for you to try.

I'll biwire if my cables are setup for it but can't claim I hear any difference.
Just remember if you use a jumper at the speaker terminals and measure resistance with an ohm meter you find a short. If you remove the jumpers and run biwire cable from a single set of binding posts at the amp end, you will still measure a short at the speaker terminals. Electrically the two points are identical either with jumpers or with biwire cables. It makes me wonder what sonic difference the extra wire could make.

IMO some speakers do benefit from bi wiring and some to a lesser degree. I've been trying to find a 1 meter pair of top of the line bi-wire cables for my tube mono-block amps. They are just too hard to find in a 1 meter length terminated. I'm puzzled on that front. I simply don't like my system with the jumpers in place. I've tried inexpensive to expensive jumpers and my system seems to have a restrictive soundstage vs bi wiring my system with the same type wire. Even when I try different wiring on the woofer and the 40" Ribbon I get different sound characteristics. My speakers are Apogee Centaur Majors and my Mono-blocks are Lang M70 push pull parallel amps with a Dynaco Lineage but with 4 EL34's and a 6SL7 and 6SN7 octal front end.