To twist or keep separate

Personally, I try one channel with speaker cables run parallel and the other channel twisted. Listen and compare to judge for yourself. Post your results for others to read.

Twisting positive and negative lowers inductance (important) and increases capacitance (not important). It also makes cable immune to electromagnetic and capacitive noise pickup (and radiation). Twisting two already twisted cables is different and doesn’t serve any purpose. In fact, cable manufacturers go to exotic schemes, like helical twist on hollow tube or flat cables (made of multiple twisted pairs) to split thicker wire into multiple isolated strands and then separating them, so that each strand is exposed only to magnetic field of neighboring strands. All thing comes from skin effect phenomena that becomes relevant in copper at 18awg @ 20kHz. That at least is the reason for such designs, but I doubt it is audible. I would just keep them apart. Adding second cable will reduce overall inductance, but I suspect that your intention might be different. You probably think of better damping of the membrane by reducing resistance in series. That won’t make any difference, since for the purpose of damping there are already many ohms of speaker’s own impedance in series (source impedance) and two wires in parallel would improve it only by a fraction of 1 percent. Lets us know how it sound with and without added cable.

Elizabeth is correct in that I am not running 2 positive and 2 negative runs but rather just doubling up the normal connection with a second run. Guess I could give a listen both ways (twisted or run in parallel) and see if there's a difference. Cables are 30 years old and very well broken in but my new gear is still going thru break in. I'll give both methods a try after break in.

Elizabeth,
interesting idea you had about the rope however I can't imagine attempting to snake a 1/2" rope thru 15 ft of cable 4 times. You must have a lot of patience or very short runs.

Thanks all for the feedback.
J.Chip

If you’re running each 4TC as a separate positive or negative run, then it would be good I think to twist them as the noise-canceling effect of the weave will have been bypassed within each leg at that point, unless you twist them.

I would not think it important to keep them together. Theses Kimbers are a woven design that’s meant to minimize the electrical field. The effectiveness of the weave may not be exactly 100%, but may be slightly negative overall or slightly positive...but this would be true for any length of 4TC. Therefore, if you twisted them together, I’m thinking there would be no cancellation of noise between wires of like charge as there would be between a negative conductor and positive conductor that were twisted.