Why bi-wiring is bad


From a link at the Chris Van-Haus website:
THE DISADVANTAGE WITH BI-WIRE

One thing that happens when you biwire your loudspeakers is that the input of the high- and the low-pass filters are fed with different input signals. The difference is a result of the high frequencies and the low frequencies being forced to travel different paths, perhaps through different types of cables, but under all circumstances through cables who have seen different loads (a tweeter with a high pass filter has a completely different impedance response compared to a woofer with a low pass filter!).

What happens is that the drivers will work less good together than when their filter halves were fed with equal signals. The result is a generation of more static and stochastic phase error sounds at different directions from the loudspeaker. The stochastic phase error sounds appear because there may be different types of unlinearities in the low- and high-frequency paths.

What does this sound like? Well, usually, just as you may expect from physics, it appears as a change in the reproduction of space and sound stage. Often, the first impression is that the "biwired" sound presents extended "dimensions", more "air", and is more "living". The impression after a week or month, however, is that all recordings sound very much alike, and the "airiness" appears on all records. It does not even sound like air anymore, instead more like a slime that pollutes every record you play. No wonder, since it is not a real, recorded quality but a "speaker characteristic" added to all reproduced material. "Sameness" is another word for it.

I just went back to bi-wiring over the weekend. The first thing I noticed was cymbal-like instruments shimmer much more. Secondly the bass now seemed to be less perhaps due to the greater high frequency information.
On orchestra music the orchestra is now well behind the speakers instead of right at the speaker. Like the article said, this may be a phase or time shift error and the depth may become wearing over time.
Finally there is slighlty better separation between instruments. It's easier to pick out each instrument.
cdc

Showing 1 response by karls

I just went and looked at the Jon Risch link above, and while he has some good points, it is very oversimplified and doesn't acknowledge any of the limitations of biwiring, namely:

(1) the obvious potential for intentional and unintentional response "tweaking" that will occur using two cables rather than one, and especially two different cables (which seems to be what he is suggesting, although he doesn't come right out and say it). This can be either better or worse than the performance you would get from a single wire, depending more on random chance than anything else given the complexity of most crossovers. I'm not against tweaking the sound with cables; I just think that you ought to be honest about what you are doing.

(2) Even more important, the fact that biwiring will automatically and by default restrict the crossover design itself to a true parallel type. This in itself and all by itself is way more than enough reason to give up biwiring, in order to have the flexibility in crossover design to pursue series alignments or any number of more complex schemes.

There are a lot of pseudo-"experts" out there, and quite often I find that I am honestly not satisfied with their answers to complex technical problems; they seem to latch onto an "answer" without having adequate technical proof of the superiority of this answer. Biwiring is not necessarily a bad thing, and it is not necessarily a good thing. It is going to depend on the exact speaker drivers and cabinet design, the exact crossover topology and parts, the exact wire used, and even the amplifier(s)' own characteristics. This is one giant ball of issues all rolled into one, and any one of them is going to have a tremendous effect on the end result, but of all of them, the wire is probably going to affect it the least. That is why I refer back to #2 above; far better to be able to optimize the crossover properly than to be stuck in a "parallel" universe forever.