Wiring two post speakers with biwire cable

1)Turnaround has a pair of biwire speaker cables, consisting of 2 sets of single wire cable in a common jacket
2) he intends to use half of the bi wire set to make a single run, either with an open ended ,unconnected pair on one set of speaker terminals or tying the separate pairs of runs together to form a single but doubled parallel pair
3)shotgunning simply involves runing 2 parallel identical runs to the speaker terminals
If he is using just a single pair run from this setup, he is using one half the number of strands, one half the amount of cable and in a configuration and topography with different load qualities including the added capacitance of the unused second run.
If he ties them all together at the speaker end ,he is effectively doubling the run in parallel.
Semantics aside, the results will still be a shotgun configuration if he ties both runs together.

Sugarbrie,
It wasn't until after my last posting that I finally understood the full implications of your statement.It never occured to me that a company would stoop to such a cynical marketing ploy as the halved "biwire" scheme that you were referring to.I sincerely hope that the cable products that you address are sold for the same cost as the single run cables from which they would have been derived.Care to name names?

Caterham: A lot of cables are sold this way. Most of the Straightwire, Audioquest, Kimber, Wireworld, etc; you get the same cable whether single or bi-wire. The cost is usually only +/-$30 for the extra labor to terminate in a bi-wire configuration. If you go the their websites you will read that the cables are "Bi-wire capable".

This does seem that strange to me. If the speakers are not biwire, the signal is split to the low/high inside the speakers. Bi-Wire is moving it back to the amp (moves the crossover back). Many brands do not make a shot-gun cable, you have to terminate double runs.

I realized later what you were saying also. There are many bi-wire cables on the market and they do cost a lot more than the single cable because they are double inside (MIT, Nordost, Analysis Plus).

So Turnaround; what kind of cables do you have?????

The speaker cables are 8' harmonic tech pro 9+, which have four terminations on the speaker end. My speakers are Thiels, which have a 4 ohm impedence rating.

I am wondering if it's okay to go with what I have, or if (for safety or sound reasons) I should consider cables with just two terminations on the speaker end.

Can you explain more about this idea of the shotgun configuration -- how/why does that work, and on what systems what would it be good or bad?

It seems to me that there is every reason that shotgunning the system would result in a different sound, though how that sound would differ might vary considerably from cable to cable. This is because the total capacitance, inductance, and resistance "seen" by the system would be different with two cables in parallel versus just one cable, even if the cables were perfectly identical.

Hell, just hook 'em up this way and that and see what sounds best.

BTW, I'm told that when one opens the back of even some very high end speakers one finds the biwire terminals jumpered, with just two conductors running to the xover. What a joyful surprise that must be for some poor schmuck who has just laid out lots of extra cash for a set of biwire cables....

May such vendors all suffer immediate and total stapes calcification!