Speaker Jumper Cables Revisited
I know there are multiple threads on Audiogon dealing with this topic, but a recent experience with budget speakers was significant enough I wanted to share to see if others have experienced similar results.
My office system has a pair of Wharfedale Diamond 12.0’s (biwirable) flanking my computer monitor. They are driven by a laptop computer running JRiver Media Center, an Audioquest Dragonfly Red DAC and a Rega BrioR (Gen 1). ICs and speaker cables are decent quality Audioquest. I also have a Monitor Audio subwoofer. All components are on modest power conditioners and have upgraded power cables.
I asked the salesman when I purchased the Wharfedales if he thought replacing the stock jumpers would improve their sound, and he said “maybe, but I doubt it”. I have some experience with much older Diamond 8 series speakers, and I experimented with removing the metal plate jumpers and replacing with various home brew and store bought jumpers to some positive effect. After breaking in the 12.0s, while I generally liked the sound, I can’t help tinkering. I looked into buying premade jumpers, but name brand jumpers with quality materials are bloody expensive, like quickly approaching the cost of the speakers themselves. No thanks.
I looked on eBay and found some flat ribbon jumpers that are supposedly silver plated OCC copper with very sturdy looking Gold plated spade connectors. Very Nordost like, but unbranded. They were $11 plus change. Probably not made in Massachusetts, LOL. At first they sounded hard and brassy at volume. Undeterred, I let them cook for several weeks at background volume levels and didn’t really pay any attention.
A month or so after replacing the stock plates with the eBay jumpers, I did some serious listening. WOW! I mean REALLY WOW!! I was hearing what sounded like completely different and better speakers. All harshness was gone. In near field listening, the soundstage was deeper and more defined both laterally and vertically. Treble had more speed and air, and notes hung in the air for what seemed like the exact right amount of time before disappearing. Midrange had more bite when called for and was appropriately smooth and mellow when that was in the recording. Both male and female vocals were more convincing. Bass is not a big thing with a 4” woofer, but what bass there is was both cleaner and faster.
Adding the eBay jumpers made the modestly priced Diamond 12.0’s sound closer to, and in some aspects better than the speakers in my reference system which cost about six times as much, and in some aspects maybe sound a little better. It really sounded like I had dropped a much better DAC into the system.
My previous experience with jumping the older Wharfedale Diamonds didn’t prepare me for what I heard from the new Diamond 12.0 with inexpensive but apparently high quality jumpers. This is a testament to the both the design success of the latest Diamond series from Wharfedale, and to the quality of cabling available on the market now at a low cost, presumably from China. I do not know if the copper in the cable is really OCC, or the spades are really gold-plated copper instead of brass, but it sure sounds like it. Oh, and the salesperson was totally wrong, OK? YMMV
kn
Thread update. based on the success using the $11.00 jumpers, I took a deeper dive into off brand jumpers and found a pair of twisted, thick format supposedly silver plated OCC jumpers with supposedly rhodium plated copper spades. These were like $40 online. They are super stiff and difficult to bend into place, but once broken in they sound noticeably better than the flat ribbons with the gold plated spades. I am stopping here at jumpers costing over 10% the list cost for the speakers. But these little Wharfedale Diamond speakers are a tremendous value and sleeper that only really shined at full potential when I dumped the stock metal plate jumpers. Highly recommended upgrade. |
Great post. Always thought highly of Wharfedale Diamonds, especially at their very reasonable price points, so nice to hear some confirmation of this. |
@soix that is really surprising! I never would have thought to do that with fully bi-wired speaker set-ups. I am cross connecting the speaker cables on the back of the Wharfedales - positive lead to the positive tweeter terminal - and the negative lead to the negative mid/woofer terminal - and then jumping both negative and positive terminals with the after market jumpers. This sounds better to me (getting similar to the results you get with jumping bi-wired speakers) than connecting both leads to either the mid/woofer terminals or the tweeter terminals - although those connections each have their own sound signature. As for the Wharfedale Diamond 12 line - they have a new designer, Karl-Heinz Fink (kind of the designer de jour for many different brands and lines today), and the speakers are so much more capable than the old Diamond 8's I have owned for about 20 years, it is not even funny. With the good jumpers in place, they are WOW good. For one thing, the cabinets are almost completely inert when rapped with knuckles. The dynamic envelope for things like drum hits and their spatial capabilities are way out of proportion with their cost. kn |
Yup — me nether. Coulda bowled me over with a feather. BTW, that’s really interesting about the new designer — I had no idea. That significantly more performance has apparently been achieved and assuming they’re still priced in the same ballpark that’s quite an achievement in and of itself. But what’s maybe even more impressive still is that they were able to make the cabinets more inert at the same time, which I have to think not only adds significantly to manufacturing costs but also adds weight and thus higher shipping costs. And as we know, cabinets can be a large part of a speaker’s overall cost and price. Again, very impressive, and thanks for the additional info! |
@erik_squires are you referencing the newer Diamond 12 series for the cap upgrade? |
@erik_squires got it. |
I recently moved the crossovers external on my speakers. In doing this I replaced all internal wiring with Duelund DCA 12 awg for bass drivers and 16 awg elsewhere. I replaced all speaker binding posts. Of course the speaker binging posts are now on the crossover box instead of the speaker. I took out a pound of copper in Cardas binding posts. Consistent with the "low mass" theory of wiring, I try not to put large chunks of conductors (usually speaker binding posts) in the signal path. I made my own binding posts from high conductivity copper machined into a tube of the same cross-sectional area as the conductor. I use bfa style "banana" plugs. I did have 2 pairs of cardas posts designed for bi wiring so you needed jumpers if you didn't bi-wire. Now I have one set. no jumpers. Jumpers just add to the un-necessary mass of conductor that I'm trying to eliminate. Bottom line, if I had a speaker with 2 sets of posts I'd not use a jumper. I'd take them both out. Hook both internal wires to the same pair of low mass binding posts. If you don't want to make your own, KLEI makes low mass connectors. jerry |
