TEACH ME ABOUT BI-WIRE

Sedond: The crossover reduces the interaction between the woofer and tweeter. Any back EMF produced by the woofer will be absorbed by the amplifier and rejected by the tweeter side of the crossover network, as it should be. Adding wire will not help this process.

Sedond, regarding bi-wiring: if your speaker's crossover network isn't enough to isolate the tweeter from the woofer, why would some extra wire be enough?

Sedond, you've got part of it. But the tweeter's side of the crossover network is a very high impedance--typically several kilohms--to the woofer's back EMF, while the amplifier is a very low impedance, typically several milliohms. That means that the tweeter network is going to reject the woofer's back EMF, and the amplifier will absorb it, regardless of the extra wire. It's like pouring water on the side of an incline; it's going to flow downhill (the low impedance path) instead of uphill (the high impedance path), and you don't need to do anything extra to make the water not flow uphill.

To improve the amplifier's absorption of the back EMF (better known as damping), you should provide a path between woofer and amplifier that is as low in resistance as possible. That would entail wire with large conductors. Alternatively, you could place the jumpers on the speaker terminals, and thus use doubled-up conductors, which would provide the same benefit as using wire 3 AWG larger.

Sedond: You say bi-wiring makes your speakers sound better. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, maybe it's real, maybe it's all imaginary. I don't have any reason to believe that it does (the hypothesis you mentioned doesn't add any weight), but then I believe in keeping high standards to avoid wasting extra money on stuff that doesn't work.

Redkiwi: Your conclusions are faulty. The issue is whether there is real benefit to bi-wiring, not in whether the circuits are the same. There is proven benefit to minimizing the speaker cable resistance between the speaker, especially the woofer, and the amplifier. There is only anecdotal evidence -- no positive results from blind testing -- that bi-wiring improves the sound. Therefore, it's far more likely that joining the wires at the speaker would improve the sound by reducing the series cable resistance through parallel wire paths than separating them into a "bi-wire" arrangement, which doesn't take full advantage of the conductors available.

Jerie: Any component can and should stand on its own performance, regardless of brand or model. Speaker wire, however, has a single purpose: to deliver audio in the form of electrical signals to the speaker. The ideal wire will deliver exactly the same voltage to the speaker as the amplifier produces. No wire is perfect, but it's easy to get close enough for practicality by minimizing the electrical attributes, primarily series resistance but to a much lesser extent shunt capacitance and series inductance, that degrade the signal voltage. That's why speaker cables that work best tend to be as short and fat as possible, regardless of brand.