biwire trick


Some of you seasoned vets may have heard of this, but I had never thought about it. Researching jumpers led me to Music direct's website, where in the description of some Nordost jumpers it read to try switching one lead from both mid and tweet. IOW take the positive lead from the tweeter and swap it with the pos lead from the mid.

I have a true biwire setup (separate runs for mid and tweet), don't know if this makes a diff, but the sound definitely improved: fuller, more natural, larger stage. try it as one of the easiest, free tweaks to do. You may be surprised.
tholt
Tvad is absolutely right about education - knowledge certainly does instill principles about the right way and wrong way to hook up electronic equipment.

All I am saying is that from a "best practice" perspective it is wrong to use speakers wires with a large + and - wire separation to create excessive induction in a part of the system circuitry that is supposed to be as transparent and loss-less as possible.

Of course you are all free to do whatever you want. If an odd way to hook things up happens to work and you like to do it then great - it is not wrong from your individual perspective with your system as it just happens to sound better.

However, on the whole across all the many systems world wide, your approach is not best practice and I would not recommend it (and that is what I was trying to say). The global standard of selling speaker cables in jackets with two closely adjacent + and - wires is still the current best practice and the "right" approach to get the equipment to perform according to the manufacturer's intent.

I know Al will agree with me on this one, as he is a EE and all audio equipment is designed to be hooked up with connections that are as transparent as possible.
It's worked for me.

I have DIY speaker cables and name brand speaker wires.

I have Ref 3A biwired speakers(which come with solid core thin wire jumpers).

I've posted here previously asking about what speaker wires other Ref owners were using, because I had not been having much luck whether I biwired or ran with jumpers using some pretty decent name wires.

Then I saw the Nordost ad and decided "why not" about the only thing i haven't tried.

It worked.

Even better than two runs of my DIY speaker cables.
The single run of speaker wires in the diagonal arrangement with the stock Ref 3a solid core jumpers has given me a much clearer listening experience.
It seems to flesh out the top end with no loss of heft to the low range.
I always felt running the conventional single wire with jumpers was a compromise depending on which set of speaker terminals you designated as the primary pair for the wires.

There is no sense of loss in either the top or bottom in this configuration and I'll leave the why for others to contemplate.

The upside is that one decent set of single speaker wires is all I need now, which is a cost effective improvement if I decide to upgrade my DIY wires.
What if you have a triwire setup with the midrange and bass jumpered together for Definitive Technology Bp 2002 auto power on reasons in order to keep the bass operating? The tweeter is separate. Any recomendations?
I tried this myself to see what the results would be. My connections are a bit different, but electrically the same. I am using a Parasound HCA 3500 for the amplifier. This amp has two sets of binding posts per channel so if you want to do true bi-wire you just hook up twice as many cables. In my case I tried this in the "standard" true bi-wire configuration. As expected the soundstage got bigger, the highs were more noticeable and airy etc etc. What came along with this change though was a noticeable reduction in bass...the drivers in the speaker seemed almost out of balance. I then tried taking the following: midbass + to midbass + midbass - to tweeter -, tweeter + to tweeter + and tweeter - to midbass - . This arrangement brought the bass back to the speaker immediately. There is now improved clarity, but without the sacrifice of bass reduction. This experiment was done on Joseph Audio RM7xl's which come with the standard gold plated brass jumpers. I am now runnining Kimber 8tc (white and clear) in true bi-wire set up with the diagonal or cross swapping of the negative leads. Because my amplifier already essentially has jumpers built into it with the two sets of binding posts per channel, there is no need for a speaker jumper as described in Nordost's suggestion.