Wondering about jumpers..


This maybe a silly question but does quality play a big part with jumpers.
My speakers are bi-wireable but I want to stay with single cables.I tried bi-wiring but choose against it.
Now I only have the stock metal plate between posts.
Could I make this a DIY project with good 10-12 gauge wire and decent connections or should I buy a pair of quality jumpers?...Cardas as an example.
I think I read somewhere try to use material the same as your speaker cables.
Any suggestions for jumpers or material would be very much appreciated.
devon
No need to spend money or time  on this.... If you consider the provided bars a weak point in the circuit, replace it with 16awg or thicker pure copper or silver 4" wire, bare, and you are set with the vey best unbeatable jumper.
The Anti Cable are not as good as zip wire. If you must use them they are just magnet wire and are incredibly cheap in any quantity

I find that whether bi-wiring sounds better or not differs with the speaker and the cable. I would defend using bi-wiring with some speakers for sure. In general an improvement is possible by splitting the two halves of the crossover to locate the common earth at the amplifier rather than at the crossover. How much this is a benefit depends on the crossover design more than anything else. Minimalist crossovers benefit more from star-earthing, simply because other design parameters have been compromised in order to achieve the greater purity of using fewer and better components. Thiel crossovers are the oposite of that - heavily designed using many components to get phase and impedence curves as accurate as possible, and likely why Jim Thiel does not offer bi-wiring. Brit mini monitors with very minimalist crossovers seem to always sound better bi-wired.

Unfortunately, about a decade or so ago it became important to offer your speakers as bi-wirable because customers thought that was better, and so a number of designers added bi-wire connections even when there was no real reason to do this. What is more, people thought two sets of speaker cables must be better than one and so we got a whole lot of parameters being played with. It all added complexity to an already difficult problem - finding a great combo of amp, SC and speaker.

Some speakers do sound better bi-wired. My main point is that if you are going to single-wire a bi-wirable speaker then a few minutes with a screwdriver is cheaper and better. My second point was a bit broad, I admit. But I do know that some designers have put bi-wire connections on speakers when they don't actually believe bi-wiring is beneficial. That I find annoying. Good for Jim Thiel and a few others that don't stupidly follow the fashion for the sake of it.

One way of getting a good idea of how bad jumpers sound is to connect to the woofer and use jumpers to the tweeter, and then change to connecting to the tweeter and jumper to the woofer, and listen for the differences. When I have tried this I have usually heard significant differences, despite using pure silver Kimber jumpers. After that I decided to get the screwdriver out and do away with the jumpers altogether.
I replaced the Rhodium bars on my Proac Response 2S's with top of the line Cardas jumpers and the difference was astonishing.

I thought because the bars are made of Rhodium that the copper wire would not make a difference but it made a huge difference. Buy the Cardas jumpers it's a cheap tweak and you won't regret it.
Sdatch, I've owned two speakers over the years that were bi-wireable: Vandertseen 2Cs and Celestion SL-700s. In the case of both of these speakers, each sounded much better bi-wired than single-wired with a good quality jumper cable. Designers, and our friend Redkiwi, clearly differ on whether bi-wiring is a good approach. But, in the case of these two speakers, using the bi-wire capability did allow for improved sonics in my system at the time.

There is a discussion of the "advantages" of bi-wiring on the Vandersteen web site that will tell you more about this than I could ever pretend to explain.
.
Redkiwi, to your point, why ARE there so many bi-wireable 2 ways? Especially with regard to small monitors - I don't understand the benefit. Reading your post, I feel almost silly for never thinking of that.
Unfortunately jumpers do make a difference. If you can, remove the plate that holds the terminals, and put all the hot wires on one of the red terminal and all the cold wires on the black terminal and reassemble. This sounds better than any jumper on the planet and is free. If this is not possible then write a complaining letter to the speaker manufacturer about how his bi-wire design really ticks you off. Many designers have unnecessarily created this hassle due to 'customer demand' so let's change their perception of what customers really want.
You may also want to check out Walker Audio's silver jumpers. I am currently using them with my Tyler Taylo Reference monitors - the upgrade was not subtle. Given that they are silver, it is possible that they may not be a perfect match for bright sounding speakers.
Devon just get the Anti cable jumpers, by Paul Spetlz
for $25, they are so neutral.I use them with my Diapason.
You will be surprise,how good they are.Thanks
It's definitely worth replacing the metal plates: good quality wire will almost always out-perform them. The Cardas jumber cables are good and not very expensive. And I've heard really good results with just some solid core silver wire connected directly without spade lugs.
.
I do hear a difference with nice jumpers compared to the stock plates that usually come with the speakers. I make cables, and use the same cable for the jumpers as I do the cables. Just it is a 2 conductor instead of a 4 conductor.