to bi-wire or not?


Looking for advice on whether to bi-wire my Joseph Audio RM22si speakers.  Am currently running Acoustic Zen Satori mono cables which I love.  My local dealer tells me moving to bi-wire cables (either Satori shotgun or Hologram II) will make a huge improvement.   I have always been under the general impression that unlike bi-amping, bi-wiring is not all that beneficial - but I may be way off base.

Thoughts?  
vinylbliss

Showing 3 responses by soix

+1 akg.  Very speaker dependent.  I have compared single vs. shotgun biwire Satoris on my Soliloquy 6.2s and prefer the biwire, but the difference is not night and day.  On my cables, the high frequency cable is a standard Satori cable and the midwoof cable is specifically designed for that purpose -- not sure how much that is driving the difference between bi and single wire.  I believe Robert at AZ will custom build a shotgun pair for your specific purposes and speakers, but you might want to check on that.  If you're in the NYC area you're welcome to borrow mine for a bit.  

What actually made a bigger improvement than biwiring was adding thin wire jumpers in the banana connectors ALONG WITH biwiring (this was recommended to me by a cable designer that I tried with great skepticism).  This tightened the bass up noticeably and improved imaging to the point that I wouldn't listen without them.  I got mine a while back from Stereovox (now Black Cat?), and IME this is a cheap (and relatively obscure) tweak everyone should try if they can.  

Anyway, hope this helps and best of luck.  BTW, great speakers.  Ironically my final decision was between my 6.2s and the RM22s, and it was a VERY tough decision.  My next speakers will almost certainly be JAs. 

My speakers, like yours, are relatively high efficiency designs, and my uneducated guess is that as a result we may hear less benefit from doubling the cable size than might be heard when connected to lower efficiency speakers (and/or amps with higher output impedance?).  That said, and as I mentioned previously, I still get a small but still tangible benefit in my system, but I'll be interested in your findings.  Obviously make sure cables are fully broken before making any definite conclusions.  

The main reason for this post is to reiterate that this may be a good time to try the aforementioned banana jumpers in addition to the biwires once you have a handle on the biwire effects.  These are just 3" thin single wires you'd use to bridge each the two positive and negative speaker posts together.  I'm not really sure why this works, but it provided a much greater benefit in my system than just biwiring alone.  FWIW. 


Ghosthouse is correct.  Chris was the one who got me to try this using his jumpers, and in my system it was all positive.  Just shows how this cable stuff is really so system dependent.  I too thought biwiring required removing jumpers, but that's not the case.  In my setup I have shotgun biwire cables with spades, so my jumpers are terminated with bananas and bridge the lower and upper positive terminals and same for negative -- just to be clear on how this works.  At the very least it's a cheap and easy tweak to try, and if it works you won't listen without them anymore.