My speakers have Cardas binding posts I use the silver jumpers that came with the speakers.
Bi-Wire Jumpers
Just an FYI I have a pair of Sonus Faber Olympica three's I am using Cardas golden reference, never bothered with the Bi-Wire option just listened for almost a year , then on a whim bought a pair of Cardas Bi-wire jumpers. What a difference ! those little plates were killing performance , those Jumpers cost me 100.00 and made just an awesome improvement in just about every aspect of the speakers performance, I was stunned. my advice, ditch those little metal plates as fast as you can. I think now I might just go for a set of Bi-Wire cables.
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I Just made experimentation about Biwire and use of Jumper. And I am not sure about biwire speaker cable is as good as single wire with good jumper ? What I have notice is after a few weeks with two pair of good speaker wire (one pair with banana BFA and the second pair Spades) the result is: good details music more in front. I return to one pair with spades connecte to the bass speaker binding post, with jumper to the mid tweeter speaker binding post, result: best intigration of instruments, much more balance music, musical timbre, less in front music as if it is a little center back, I think its more homogeneous music. |
Without prejudice to the effects that the absolute benefits are always system dependent, a chunk of the high-end quality build speaker cable brands are moving away from bi-wiring in favour of shotgunned speaker cable runs and jumpers.... ... Bi-amping is a Different story. E.g. NORDOST ,https://www.nordost.com/downloads/multiLanguage/NorseJumperinstructions_new.pdf “.... it’s a fair bet that the same cables wired in a shotgun configuration (or all wired to the bass terminals) and used in conjunction with purpose built links, like the Norse Jumpers, will offer better performance still. • Just because your speaker offers multiple input cabling doesn’t mean that bi- or tri-wiring will necessarily produce better results. Optimal Bi-Wiring Even if your speakers do sound better bi-wired, often the best route to optimum performance will involve a period of single-wired operation (that’ll be while you are saving up for a second run of really good speaker cable). So, how should you set about cabling your speakers? • Use a set of matching bi-wire jumpers constructed using the same cable or cable technology as your main speaker wires...” CHORD http://www.chord.co.uk/speaker-cable-guide/ ".... Many hi-fi and home cinema loudspeakers have two pairs of binding posts. This allows the speaker to be either bi-wired using two sets of loudspeaker cable or bi-amped using two amplifiers. As a general rule (and there will always be exceptions) we tend to find that bi-wiring will open out the sound stage and increase perceived levels of detail. However, single wiring will often sound the most musically coherent. There is also an issue with single and bi-wire speaker cables. In all the research we have carried out, a single wire speaker cable out-performs a bi-wire cable of equivalent cost. This makes a lot of sense; the single wire speaker cable has two high quality conductors and the bi-wire cable requires four. So for a given budget, we believe that a single wire cable will always out-perform the equivalent bi-wire cable, so much so that we no longer produce dedicated bi-wire cables..." For me, after extensive experimentation with biwiring with numerous high end speaker brands (including NORDOST...) the shotgunned NORDOST FREYs with matched shotgunned FREY jumpers bested all comers. The differences were not subtle. |
Having run a bi-wire set up for many years, I do not agree that running bi-wire is 'useless' as itzhak1969 claims. Many speakers have their x-overs optimized for a bi-wire set up, including many of the SF models. If you have the option of running bi-wire and can accommodate that vs. running single wire onto the bi-wire connections and then using a decent jumper, IME the bi-wire set up is superior. This has always been my experience if the speaker was designed for this type of connection. ( albeit many were not). |