Biwire or Jumpers: which is better?

biwiring improved my speakers noticeable; biamping *really* improved them!

I have a similiar situation: I was using the stock jumpers that came with my Alon Petites but switched to a double run of older AudioQuest Type 6 wire. The sound is much clearer, except that I can not get a focused sound stage. I have experimented with the phasing of the high and low inputs, but it just gets worse. There is a hole in the middle of the soundstage (nothing is centered). Any ideas???? Please help!!!

How far apart are your speakers. Try and bring them a little bit closer if your setup allows. Keep moving them closer until the hole in the middle vanishes. Also, make sure you are not out of phase on your amp side. Good Luck

I have used Vandersteen 2Ces, 3As, and 3A sig.-- all are specifically designed for biwiring, and the Vandersteen manual says if you can't afford to biwire when you first get the speakers, do it as soon as possible as it will yield a significant music improvement. I also talked to Richard Vandersteen by 'phone, and he said they had done extensive listening tests at their factory and concluded that biwiring was definitely superior on Vandersteen speakers. RV did not recommend any specific brand of cable, he just said "there are a lot of good ones; let your ears be the judge". I took this to mean that Vandersteen has no particular interest in selling speaker cables. I have always biwired the 'steens with excellent results. It seems to me that if a designer built them to be biwired, they should be biwired to realize the ful potential of the design (unless of course they were designed by a lousy designer, but R. Vandersteen is an excellent speaker designer, and I trust his word). Not all good speakers are designed to be biwired, eg I don't think thiel speakers are, and their excellent reputation speaks for itself.

The answer depends on the speakers. If the cross-over design is near optimal then there is no significant benefit from bi-wiring. But for many speakers, either the speaker drivers themselves, or the execution of the cross-over, provide quite different loads on the amplifier, or even cause a significant back-EMF from one driver to affect another. The Martin-Logan hybrid speakers are a good example where the difference in the characteristics of the driver elements means bi-wiring is valuable. A further example can be seen in many British mini-monitors where the cross-overs are kept very minimalist in the interests of resolution and immediacy, but at the expense of good driver impedence matching. At the other extreme, Thiel speakers have very sophisticated cross-overs and Jim Thiel claims that as a result there are no benefits from bi-wiring. Even though the electrical issues seem insignificant, the effect of bi-wiring is to star-earth the separate drivers at the amp. Without bi-wiring you are star-earthing at the speaker terminals (or somewhere in the cross-over itself in single-wired speakers like Thiels). Obviously star-earthing at the amp is better, but some would argue the very low resistance of the speaker cable makes the difference irrelevant. Nevertheless I have seen calculations that show even the very low resistance of a speaker cable is enough to create distortion through the lack of star-earthing at the amp. So to make a long story short - there is no general rule. Some speakers really do need to be bi-wired, whereas others do not. The problem with bi-wiring of course is that you have to spend twice as much on speaker cable than you otherwise would have, and you really should get as good a speaker cable as you can - most people underspend in this area.