If I have speakers with bi-wire terminals and only want to use single wire cables, is there any reason I can't desolder the wires from the low frequency posts and solder them to the high frequency posts or vice versa? Seems to make a lot more sense then adding expensive jumpers (which have made a difference in my experience), yet I have never seen this done or suggested. I would also need one less set of binding posts if I wanted to upgrade.
Eugene81, this thread doesn't need to be complicated. Your idea is perfectly fine. If you are happy that you are not going to biwire then shifting the wires internally to one post each for postive and negative is actually the best solution. It has the advantage of eliminating 1 set of connections plus the additional jumper wire which has to be an improvement..
Well, that's more complicated since I will need to acquire additional "internal wire" to use as jumpers or disconnect, shorten, and reconnect the internal runs. It's far easier to combine the connections. It would also be nice to recover a whole 4 piece set of WBT nextgen binding posts I previously installed and use them elsewhere.
Thanks for the clarification, Kal. I was envisioning that no additional wire would be needed to change the connections internally. In any event, we're on the same page with respect to the bottom line, which is that there is no point in doing anything internal to the speaker.
No. I am saying that regardless of the wire he uses, it doesn't matter whether he solders it internally or wires it as a jumper externally, it will make no difference at all.
If he wants to rewire internally, he is only making more bother for himself.
(This whole thing is a tempest in a teapot. 2-3" of wire is unimportant.)
No. I am saying that regardless of the wire he chooses, it doesn't matter whether he solders it internally or wires it as a jumper externally, it will make no difference at all.
kr4, not sure you understand what I'm asking and I don't understand your response. Use the same wires as jumpers instead of jumpers...?
What Kal (KR4) is suggesting is using jumpers that consist of the same kind of wire that is used for the speaker's internal connections to the binding posts.
Assuming that the required jumper length is short, and given that most and probably all predictable speaker cable effects can be expected to be proportional to length, that sounds like a good approach to me.
My point is that soldering the wire internally and using it as a jumper are entirely equivalent if done competently. So, if you think that soldering the cheaper wire internally will work better than using the same wire as a jumper, it will be due only to your belief and/or inability to see that it is not an "expensive" jumper.
kr4, not sure you understand what I'm asking and I don't understand your response. Use the same wires as jumpers instead of jumpers...?
Kernelbob, good jumpers have made significant improvements in my experience. Anyway, I do not want to turn this into a discussion of biwire vs. single wire, which has been done to death and always gets contentious, and I am not talking about a bi-amp situation.
You mention that you've tried using jumpers. Did you mean to say "which have not made a difference..."? The reason I ask is that jumpers don't provide the benefit that biwiring can.
If the high-pass crossover functions by presenting a high impedance at bass frequencies (as they normally do), then with biwiring to the high-pass connection, little to no bass current will flow because of the high impedance at low frequencies.
This means that few or no magnetic fields would be generated by the (now absent) low frequency current which could otherwise modulate the midrange/treble. This should make your midrange and (especially) the treble sound cleaner. Using jumpers or a single connection doesn't provide that benefit since the bass, midrange, and treble current all flow through the same cable up to where the jumpers connect or to where the low-pass and high-pass leads are internally joined.
When I biamp my system, I use a less expensive speaker cable from the bass amp and use the high performance speaker cable on the top, though ideally the type of cables would best be used on top and bottom, so this is a cost compromise. When I biwire using one amplifier's output, I biwire with the much better sounding, expensive speaker cable.
Instead of soldering, why not simply use the same wires as jumpers? I do not understand why you think that "expensive jumpers" are the only alternatives to an internal intervention.
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