Wiring two post speakers with biwire cable

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!

Turnaround: There is only a $28 difference between the list prices of the mono (single) and bi-wire versions of your cables, and the website only describes one type of construction of the internal cable, so they are definitely the same cables whether they are terminated with 2 or 4 connectors on the speaker end.

Therefore, if you just connect the two reds together and two blacks together on the single red and black lugs on the back of your speakers, they should perform pretty much the same as the mono (single, non-biwire) version of those cables.