TEACH ME ABOUT BI-WIRE


I see a lot mentioned about bi-wiring. I am not familar with this. I know you must have speakers that can be bi-wired and they are configured for bi-wire by removing a buss bar to seperate speakers and/or crossovers within the cabinet. I have also read that you need to have an amp that has bi-wire capability (two left and two right speakers outputs - and not to be confused with speakers A & B).

Can someone explain what takes place within each speaker when it is set up for bi-wiring? What are the advantages and disadvantages if any? What if my amp only has one set of left and right speakers outputs (but has something called loops for additional amps), Can you accomplish bi-wiring if you had two amps? If so how would it work?
sfrounds

Showing 1 response by phild

Jostler3 may be partially right, but he's not completely right. His theory only makes sense if the connection between the bass and treble speaker connections are connected by jumpers made of the same cable as your speaker wire, and your wire and jumpers happen to have the same properties as the binding posts themselves.

Many bi-wire ready speakers have their bass/treble connections bridged by posts. I had a pair of Mission 753 speakers with gold posts connecting the low and high speaker terminals. Those rods were not a good connection. The treble was favored when the speaker wire was run to the high connection, and the bass was favored if it was run to the low connection. The resistance through the connector & crossover was obviously different from the resistance thru the connector post. Bi-wire cable sounded better than the gold posts (treble and bass were balanced).

I'm not saying that bi-wiring sounds any better or different than wire jumpers (I didn't compare), but it was better than the manufacturer supplied posts.

A dealer told me that our choice of bi-wire or wire jumpers should depend on our speakers' cross-over design (and he wasn't trying to upsell me...the cost was the same, and I wasn't buying anything). I'm not a speaker designer...I don't know if that's true, or not.