Tannoy Speakers & Bi-wiring

fwiw when using a single run of wire with jumpers there are 3 (actually 4) ways to hook them up.

1) speaker wire to woofer and jumpers to tweeter
2) speaker wire to tweeter and jumpers to woofer
3) one speaker wire to - woofer and one to + tweeter (or vise versa) and jumpers between them like normal.

Bob Neill from Amhearst Audio recommends the 3rd option and I found it to be the best choice because it eliminates (for the most part) favoring one of the drivers over the other which I found happens when using the normal jumper hookup method.

I hope I made myself clear and there are no mishaps because of miscommunication.

Pani, what wire are you using to bi-wire the Tannoys?

I have used quite a few. When I was using Naim amplification I used the NAC A5. Now I am using wavac valve amplification so I have tried speaker cables from Harmonix, ASI Liveline, Chord. The thing is, with Tannoy, while biwiring makes everything sound very airy and open, the feeling intimacy and tight coherence is lost in the process. The speakers disappear more readily when biwired, but that feels more like a special effect because music becomes too distant. It is just my observation with Tannoys. As, I said before, with ATC biwire is a must.

I have Canterbury SE, and bi-wire with Audioquest Mont Blanc low and KE-4 high. I really want to think cables are BS, but there is a modest improvement in resolution, clarity, and extension by running this bi-wire config vs. either cable alone (the jumpers used are either nice Acrolink or VdH; not junk). It's not a huge improvement, but I always end up going back to it, otherwise I'd happily sell either cable for their used market value.

That said, the retail value of comparable current cables is ludicrous. For anything near their the current retail prices, that money would be WAY better off invested anywhere else (e.g. phono stage, amp, vintage tubes, etc). For the prices I paid for these used cables a few years ago, they're a reasonable addition to my system.

Mulveling, the most fundamental rule of biwiring of passive speaker is to use the same wire for all the drivers, else the drivers will not be time aligned. Please read this:
http://www.vandersteen.com/pages/Answr7.htm

Pani, that page does little to convince me of such a fundamental rule. There can be no impact on time alignment, even with cables of slightly differing lengths -- electronic signals are orders of magnitude faster than sound waves. My Tannoys are not actually time aligned, anyways.

Barring electrical mismatch, I'm skeptical there can be much impact on coherence -- if there was, then I'd have gone back to a single run. It's quite coherent sounding, as to be expected of a Tannoy. Next, look at the crossover adjustments on these Tannoys: you can modify 1.1kHz tweeter shelving, which I've had sound excellent in either 0.0 or +1.5dB positions. That's MUCH larger than the differences between any 2 reasonable cables. Yet the tweeter and woofer can still blend seamlessly in either configuration, as long as it's the right choice for the overall system balance. And then the tweeter/woofer drivers themselves couldn't possibly be more different (2" metal dome compression driver; 15" paper woofer), and yet they too blend beautifully. Again, these differences are far greater than those between cables, yet they don't preclude excellent coherence.