Biwire vs Single/jumper: Cardas Golden Ref


My experience - similar to others per these discussion boards - is that the effect of moving to internal bi-wire (or even shotgun pair) from single wire plus jumper is a little bit unpredictable.

Specific question: what was your result comparing Cardas Golden Reference in single wire with jumper versus internal biwire at the speaker end?

Current speakers are Silverline 17.5 .
Amp is Cary SLI-80.

Thank you.
Art
artmaltman

Showing 3 responses by stanwal

I am using Cardas GR with jumpers as I didn't want the expense and complexity of two cables and didn't seen any Cardas biwire used when I was shopping. Has worked fine with Cardas jumpers [the smaller ones]. I am now trying out VH Audio 14 gauge silver wire as jumpers, first impression is that it is even better. The jumper is more important than many people, including some manufactures, seem to think.
I took it to mean putting one at the top and one at the bottom, i.e., hot to tweeter hot and ground to bass ground or vice versa. I seem to remember trying this sometime in the past but forget how it worked; let us know what you mean. I am using a very cheap but really surprisingly effective jumper just now, 10 gauge solid copper. As an audiophile I should say that it is 9 9s copper imported from the East at great expense but it is actually Romex, works great on my tri wire S 100s.
It wasn't bad but when I went back to my Cardas jumpers [ $80 each pair] it was a definite improvement; but the Romex was better than the ones you usually get with most speakers. Another attempt to go cheap fails. The Spendor S 100s have provision for tri wiring. The best arrangement I have found for them so far is the main cable to the treble posts, putting spade jumpers between the bass and midrange, and then connecting bananas from the treble post to the bass post, so the midrange gets the signal last. Not what I expected but seems to work; another thing that surprises me is that ON MY SPEAKERS connecting to the bass posts and going to the treble last seems to give more high end than going to the treble first; too much in fact.