Jumpers vs bi-wire

Since Bi-wires originated from a single point. The terminal of your amp. Shouldnt instead of connecting to for example the low freq posts then jumpering to the High but instead connecting in the middle of the jumper be the same as bi-wiring? Picture your amp being the apex of the V with your high and low posts being the ends. now grab the wires at the apex of the "V" slide it towards the speaker Creating a "Y". Essentialy the "Y" is there all along its just that the vertical leg is in the amp hidden from view. Try that experiment ☺

Flickkit, it doesn't quite work that way. The point of bi-wiring is to have the currents that flow through the high-frequency drivers travelling in a different wire than the currents for the low frequency drivers. If it was wired as you suggest it would be no different that single wiring with a jumper. Both high and low frequency currents would flow in the same piece of wire. Jon Risch at audioasylum has some good material on the subject.

But Nighthawk, the signals going to the separate points on the speaker are identical (there is no separating going on at the amplifier end), so bi-wiring is exactly like Flickkit said. Doubling the size of a single wire will give you the same effect as by-wiring, with less fuss.

Inpep, nope it's not the same. The gauge of the wire is irrelevant. The high frequency currents are much less in magitude than the low frequency currents. Assume the amp is an ideal voltage source. It's output is no different whether you bi-wire or not. The low frequency currents will cause a certain amount of voltage drop in the wire. The high freq currents will cause much less. If you combine them in the same wire, the low freq signals will modulate the high freq signals. If they are in different wires, they won't. See Jon Risch's tutorial at the link below.

http://www.geocities.com/jonrisch/biwiring.htm

Nighthawk, that is true if the wires see different frequency content, which is true if the speaker is bi-amped with the crossover before the amplifier. In this case, both wires have as their source the same frequency content since the dividing network is at the speaker, not at the amplifier. The low frequency driver gets the whole signal and the high frequency driver(s) also gets the whole signal, but then passes through the crossover to eliminate the low frequencies. Just adding a wire that goes to the "high frequency" terminals on the speaker doesn't render the feed intelligent so that it knows which wire to follow!

BTW, all waves modulate each other to give the final waveform, which is the sum of all of the modulations.