Bi-wire: is it worth it?

My speakers are set up for bi-wiring and my cables are bi-wired Kimber 8PR banana plugs. If I wanted to compare bi-wire to regular (single) as this point, what do I do?

Yes, I have the original metal jumpers, but some think they degrade the sound and custom jumpers are needed. If I get custom jumpers, what brand?

And ... lastly, what do I do with the extra set of cable leads? Tape over the banana leads and fold them back?

I bet the whole quixotic exercise will be one of futility, but I'm game to try.

Bifwynne, getting custom jumpers and only using half of the Kimber 8PR would not be a fair test. A quick easy way to eliminate bi-wire is to install the jumpers with the 8PR connected as it is now. If you could use a short piece of quality wire to do this, that should be better than the straps. Nevertheless, that will eliminate bi-wire for a comparison.

@Kijanki, IMHO your back EMF explanation is the only plausible one I have heard for why it would be beneficial to bi-wire.

However, I wonder then what the point is of bi-wiring with a cable that has all for wires twisted and wrapped in the same sheathing. Wouldn't the individual runs need to be separated in order to fully isolate them from EMF interactions?

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.

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.