Nick_sr, I don't know - inductance is inductance in any configuration but there are different and often strange findings. I've heard, for instance, that shorting positive (red) of upper and lower speaker in biwired speaker changes the sound. I have tried it and it does, but the only explanation I can come up with is that it removes half of the inductance from divider. Change was very small and I don't remember if it was for the better or the worse. It must've been for the worse since I rejected idea.
Bi-wire: is it worth it?
I am about to buy a sweet set of used martin logan stats. They have four terminals, and can be bi-wired. Someone has suggested I should bi-wire them. However, this would come at an additional cost, as I would have to buy new speaker cables. Does bi-wiring make a noticeable difference?
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I have a pair of Mirage M5si's. They're bipolar 6-1/2" 2-ways, with matching pairs firing forward and backward. These speakers respond to every improvement in amplification and cabling you can throw at them. My first wife could IMMEDIATELY tell if they were bi-wired or not. Even if they were biwired poorly, she noticed it within a coupld or seconds. When I didn't have the money for matched biwiring, I combined a set of solid core TARA Labs with some Straightwire 8-conductor ribbon cable. One night after everyone had gone to bed, I fashioned some better-than-factory jumpers from some Vampire Wire. I figured the matching cable should be better than such disparate runs to the woofers and the tweeters. The next morning, as soon as my wife turned on the system--*to watch TV*--she immediately said, "Change it back; whatever you did to the system, change it back to what it was before." It wasn't even music; it was a talk show over cable, not a $40 audiophile recording, and yet she heard the difference immediately. A year later, I upgraded the wiring to two pairs of MIT-750 and got a nice improvement in smoothness, linearity, clarity, etc. Six years after that, Audio Advisor was blowing out the last of PS Audio's foray into premium cables, and I picked up a $1500 pair of XStream Reference Bi-Wire, the only cable up to that time that had been designed from the ground up specifically for bi-wiring. It uses 6-gauge copper for the woofers and multi-strand silver-plated copper for the high frequency input. These made a dramatic difference and were icing on the cake. Before, the M5si's always sounded like big speakers, but the PS Audio bi-wire rig enabled them to scale up and down better, and particularly improved the transparency and intimacy of the presentation. A friend of mine who is no audio geek, but who heard the system before and after the switch remarked how the new cable made the speakers compete with the immediacy and intimacy of minimonitors, which they couldn't do before. Of course, YMMV. I suspect that when first order crossovers are used, there's less need for bi-wiring, but with more complex crossovers using combinations of 2nd, 3rd, and/or 4th order crossovers, biwiring asserts an advantage. Biwiring makes a consistently difference with my Mirages, but my Magnepan 1.7s don't offer bi-wire inputs, and frankly, I'm really happy with the sound as-is. |
I run Vandersteen 5s with complete double bi-wire (DBW) cabling so I guess I can't be objective. That said, there's a great article on the Vandersteen site about this topic and I have pasted an excerpt below. For me, the operational phrase is: "Coupled with a crossover designed specifically for bi-wiring. . ." Having spoken with Richard V. First hand, for my money he is an unimpeachable source of real-world intelligence, but others may feel differently. At any rate, here is the excerpt which I have edited for brevity (but changed no words--just deleted some sentences).
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"Coupled with a crossover designed specifically for bi-wiring. . ."Very good point, Kjweisner, and as I said, just having multiple connections does not mean this is true. There are some, like Vandersteen, that specifically design for bi-wire, some that do single wire connections only, and others that just include the extra connections. Nevertheless, as in many cases, Al's answer is the best. You just have to try it, and see what it does for you, but don't get caught up in to thinking a difference is better as I did. Initially, I was on board with it, however, for some reason, always had the desire to make a change. I tried to supress this feeling, thinking it was just "wanting to upgrade" and then I came across this article. http://www.sonicdesign.se/biwire.html It described exactly what I was hearing, so I changed to single wire with jumpers of the same wire and was much happier. |
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