How goofy is this?

Jumpers (zu ibis) are in with the Ibis speaker cables now. SC to high posts jumpered to low.

Big improvement. Sound has gained back it's dimensionality and musicality while retaining better detail and deeper, relatively well controlled bass. Maybe a wee bit rolled off in the high, but I'm not entirely sure, and very slightly less lush in the mid.

These Ibis are extremely nice cables. Fast, controlled, musical, come to mind. A lot of PRAT. They have about 100 hours on them in a garage system so probably not fully broken in yet.

Next up I will try swapping-in the Audience cables, and I have a set of Satori Shotgun coming next week to compare also.

So overall I'd say my experiment of mix and match high/low didn't work out too well, now hearing what one set sounds like jumpered.

After listening more I started noticing an edginess in the highs that was becoming very irritating. Thin, grainy, unnatural. Violins sounded artificial and annoying.

Switched the ibis to the high and au24e to the low, and the edginess was resolved, but while there's still better detail and resolution than the audioquest, the sound is very 2-dimensional, flat, uninvolving. Less bass, but what is there is better controlled and a little less boomy so I give it "even" on that count but not ideal.

I'm hoping that when the jumpers finally get here and I switch to single wired that the downsides will resolve and I'll see improvements over the audioquest. If not, back they go in service until I find something that offers better synergy with my system.

Speaker cables so far have been the toughest piece of the puzzle for me.

I always promote connecting to HF posts and jumping to LF as explained to me by Stuart Marcus (Vampire wire) and in Tannoy speaker manuals.

04-17-12: Mapman
Doesn't register on the goofy scale for me.

Same here. I don't see any reason to be surprised.

One suggestion I would make, though, if you haven't already done it, is that you go back and forth a couple of times between the new arrangement and the Rockefellers to confirm that your findings are repeatable. That would rule out the possibility of extraneous variables such as improved contact that might have resulted from scraping away of oxidation when you changed cables, or unrelated things such as changes in AC line noise or voltage.

Regards,
-- Al

IMHO I think that this is not totally goofy. What you are hearing could be an improvement in sonics. The parallel/shot-gun biwiring does present a different impedance of the speaker to the power amp compared to a single run speaker cable & that alone can be better off for the amplifier. Often manuf will encourage biwiring for their particular speaker models.
What you should do is listening long-term to your music that you are very familiar with. You know what it used to sound like & now you are hearing a new sound. Is the new sound still better few days down the road? 1 week later? 1 month later?

Doesn't register on the goofy scale for me.

Anytime something sounds different, there is a 50/50 chance of it also sounding better versus worse for whatever reason. Those are the only two choices.

Call it audio Karma if you like.

Compared to some of the crazy stuff we do in this hobby I'd say you're barely a "1" on the audiophile goofy scale of 1-10.

I'll give it a 5.76 on the Goofy Scale.

You hear what you hear most of the time. Sometimes you hear what you want to hear.

There are so many inexplicable non-intuitive occurences with audio systems that I believe what you hear is possible.