Benefits and Drawbacks to Shotgun Speaker Cables

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Now that we've got that cleared up, running cables in shotgun fashion will DRASTICALLY alter their electrical characteristics. Any "special geometry" between the positive and negative conductors in the original design that was included to increase cable bandwidth ( such as braiding, twisting, etc...) is effectively negated when doing this. Inductance will go WAY up and series resistance should be reduced by half. In effect, we have doubled the gauge of conductors and increased the dielectric gap between the two polarities by a massive amount.

Since the resistance is lowered ( this is a good thing ), you might have better control over the drivers that produce the most reflected EMF ( electromotive force aka "voltage ) like woofers, etc... However, the increased inductance will produce greater roll-off and veiling of details as frequency rises. Dielectric absorption is also increased, as you've got twice as much insulator / cable jacket to work with.

The bottom line is that you'll probably experience warmer, tighter and more robust low frequency response with a softening of upper mids and treble response. One could somewhat "fine tune" the tonal balance of an arrangement like this by playing with the spacing or "gap" between the positive and negative cables. Some have used this to "smooth out" problems with digital glare or sibilance with great results.

Obviously, some speaker / amp / wire combo's would respond differently than others depending on the complex impedance that resulted. Results WILL vary from system to system and would be strictly a matter of personal taste. Sean
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Following on Sean's ideas, if you have bi-wire speakers you could try just the "shotgun" set up for the lows and "norman" bi-wire on the top to reduce the effects that he and both Garfish suggest in the soffened high end but perhaps with the greater bass controll that the shotgun "could" provide with some cables. Again to use Kimber 8TC as an example(it works well to illustrate it since it has no real outer jacket to hide what is going on inside,black normaly used for the - side and blue used for the + side) it would be two runs(one for+ and one for -, both black and blue combined, ) to the bass and a single run to the top on each side(with the black and blue wires seperated as normal) for a total of 6 runs of cable.

Hey Sean, I've had the opposite happen here. More high freq information for sure. I've had many veils lifted after only the first day of break-in. Bass sounds quite different. Overall the soundstage is much larger (especially in the Y axis). The speakers seem to have a much easier time reproducing images very deep in the soundstage.

My experience with biwiring my Triangle Cometes (two seperate sets of cable on each side, I think this qualifies as shotgun but I'm still a little confused) produced exactly the same results Buckingham described. An audiophile buddy and myself immediately noticed a taller and deeper soundstage, along with a sense of ease and seperation between instruments that never seemed muddy or jumbled before, but after biwiring there was no question. Actually, I was astonished at the difference this configuration made with my speakers. Before, I had accepted these speakers as kind of a compromise for now. Now I'm really loving them! I would never have known what these speakers could do until I tried biwiring.