Bi-Wiring

Would appreciate comments from those who have experience bi-wiring their speakers. Want to know if bi-wiring enhance the quality of the output.

Regards.

Thinaka

This is what I heard from some.
biwiring=buy wiring

Personally I have tried.. it doesn't make any difference, well at least in my system and to my ears..

Yes, better separation, more detailed...

Ask yourself why many speaker manufacturers include biwiring..even triwiring feature in their products.

on some setups, no diff. One other setups, big diff.

Best if you try to hear for yourself. If you don't hear any difference, don't worry and just enjoy the music. But just be careful that it doesn't mean that other systems will not have difference.

Good one

CT-Boy wrote:This is what I heard from some.
biwiring=buy wiring

Personally I have tried.. it doesn't make any difference, well at least in my system and to my ears..

i believe the original purpose behind bi or tri wiring is for used of multi amplifications.
It makes no difference in my systems

tannoy wrote:i believe the original purpose behind bi or tri wiring is for used of multi amplifications.
It makes no difference in my systems

No, what you said is wrong.

The use of multi amplifications is bi-amping or tri-amping.
Bi-wiring is not the same as bi-amping.

Hi Thinaka,

The bi/tri amp make a significant improvement when you go over certain loudness. That is no much difference when driving 850cc vs 3000cc in 20km/h.

I did my with Pre, crossover & triamp. it drive like tri turbocharge.

There is nothing wrong if you can't hear a difference between regular and bi-wiring. There is also nothing wrong if you can hear a difference (actually you can either rejoice, because your hearing acquity has improved enough or your system is good enough. But you can also cry because now you have to pay twice the price for any new speaker cable upgrade - for TWO pairs la ! ).

I know many people who can hear a difference and I myself can hear a lot of difference between 1 pair and 2 pairs cables driving my Apogee Centaur Major in bi-wire mode. But also bear in mind that for any speaker which is designed to be biwired, the way to run a single pair of cables is to physically short the two set of binding posts. Usually the speaker manufacturer supplies the shorting pins, in the case of my Major, solid gold plated copper plates. BUT the shorting pin themselves also contributes to sonic differences - i.e. numerous people including me can hear a different if we are to use specially made shorting wires instead of the pins.

mugenfoo wrote:

tannoy wrote:i believe the original purpose behind bi or tri wiring is for used of multi amplifications.
It makes no difference in my systems

No, what you said is wrong.

The use of multi amplifications is bi-amping or tri-amping.
Bi-wiring is not the same as bi-amping.

What i was trying to say is, i believe the original purpose of having separated pairs of terminals for connection is to allow us to use more than 1 amplifier for better drive and power. I am not sure when and which manufacturer introduced this. But later some hi-fi enthusiast are taking advantage of this extra terminals to play bi-wiring instead of bi-amping to see weather if there is any improvement in his system.
I agree with those who can hear differences but "difference and improvement" is two different thing.
But one thing for sure is that from the business point of view selling 2 pairs of wires always better than 1.

One statement which is pertinent in the last post is "difference may not be improvement" aspect.

When I first bi-wired my Centaur Majors, budget was a constraint. I was using van-den-hul SCS-12 in single-wire mode with the shorting plates. As I was dying to test out bi-wiring but didn't have the budget to get another pair of SCS-12 (12feet pair so very expensive), I took home a used pair of Monster speaker cable (forgot the actual model) on the agreement to purchase if suitable. I still vividly remember clearly hearing a 'disembowed' sound - the imaging, re positioning of the instruments were -different- between the ribbon and the woofer. On a wide-frequency range instrument like the piano, I can hear the piano image shifting left and right depending on the frequency of the notes - higher frequency when played, placed the piano further to the right than the lower frequency (when the woofers were working). This taught me that for proper bi-wiring, the safest bet is to get two identical pair of speaker cables. Not that different cables won't work but I do feel that it would more difficult to get them to work compared to matched pair. Later I was able to replace the scs-12 with 2 pairs of Symo cables, recommended for Apogee speakers. That was the best sound I had from the Centaur Majors - within the limitation of my budget of course.

A question often asked. How do I know the difference is an improvement ? For my case, when there is a PHYSICAL reaction to prove what I believe I was hearing, then there is no doubt. With one pair of vdh scs-12, the system sounded fine. With 2 sets of Symo, initially I was sure I could hear significant improvements - one important aspect being much better bass. As I started to play more LPs, eventually I put on one with has a paritcularly strong bass. This caused a vibration on one of the speakers. Then I found out that as the Centaur Major rests on 4 spikes, I did not have all 4 spikes set evenly on the right speaker and the stronger bass reproduction caused the speaker to rock around two spikes. As the spikes are resting on cones, they cause a metallic vibration when they impact the cones. When I and levelled the spikes correctly, the vibration dissapeared. But the gist is with only 1 pair of scs-12, the vibration did no appear. With 2 pairs of Symo, initially I could clearly hear better bass and later a PHYSICAL reaction proved that this is the case - better bass.

I am aware that some feel that difference might not mean improvement. You are not wrong. BUT, I would urge any doubters (not targetting anyone in particular) to give proper credit to those who believes they can hear an improvement. Just respect the fact that others may have a lot more experience or listening acquity than we might be giving to them superficially. Best rule of life is to never dismiss anything outright. There is nothing to lose by having an open mind.

There is really no harm trying and experimenting bi-wiring.
Not all speakers have this design and I believe there are reasons the speakers are designed with/without bi-wiring.
The best thing is to make the music listening a more enjoying hobby to yourself.

tannoy wrote:

mugenfoo wrote:

tannoy wrote:i believe the original purpose behind bi or tri wiring is for used of multi amplifications.
It makes no difference in my systems

No, what you said is wrong.

The use of multi amplifications is bi-amping or tri-amping.
Bi-wiring is not the same as bi-amping.

What i was trying to say is, i believe the original purpose of having separated pairs of terminals for connection is to allow us to use more than 1 amplifier for better drive and power. I am not sure when and which manufacturer introduced this. But later some hi-fi enthusiast are taking advantage of this extra terminals to play bi-wiring instead of bi-amping to see weather if there is any improvement in his system.

There are fundamental differences between bi-wiring vs. bi-amping.

Bi-WIRING:
In bi-wiring, the same amp's output drives the tweeter and its associated highpass network separately from the woofer and its lowpass network.

The amp's output stage still "sees" both the highpass and lowpass networks but the cable in between has effectively been "shotgunned". The damping factor changes for the better (in theory).


Bi-AMPING:
In bi-amping, separate amps drive the high and low networks separately.
The amp for the woofer will only see the lowpass network and the woofer as the load, whereas the other amp will only see the highpass network and the tweeter as the load. There is effectively no interaction (or more accurately, intermodulation) between the lowpass and highpass networks as they are effectively isolated and driven by different amp outputs.

This means that the amp driving the low freq aka woofer section won't be burdened to drive any treble signals, while the amp driving the high freq aka tweeter section won't be burdened to drive any bass signals.

This is provided the speaker's crossover network are properly designed such that when the stock shorting pins are removed, the lowpass and highpass sections do not share a common ground on the X-over circuit boards, lest it defeats the advantage of signal band isolation (no intermodulation) in the case of bi-amping.


Bi-Amping is technically and sonically superior to bi-wiring and standard-wiring. But this means u got to buy twice as many power amps, and make sure that the amps have identical characteristics, ie, they are same models of each other. But if u mix-n-match different brand amps, then high changes you'll also get a mix-n-match sound characteristics and this is highest potential to f**k-up royally your system's sound. its like a car with four different brands & different thread patterns of tyres for all its individual tyres. Anyone here driving a car with such an arrangement ?

Bi-Wiring SHOULD be technically superior to std-wiring as this is putting more metal into the cabling works. This also means while u don't spend so much $$$ to buy extra amps, u still need to buy more cable than std. The single most plausible advantage to bi-wiring is the reduction in cable impedances (yes, cables have L,C and R effects just like any other electronic component) and hence an improvement in effective damping factor. And DAMPING FACTOR is always a good thing to have as much as possible.

Some people like to mix-n-match cables to get different sonic results. While I don't personally recommend this, its negative consequences are not as critical as mix-n-matching different amps. They might just f**k-up the sound half-royally?

Some speaker manufacturers DO NOT allow for bi-anything.. (they only play straight *wink wink* ). This is mainly because the mfg has already optimised the crossover networks to match the drivers and do not want the user to fiddle and mess around with the signals going into the crossover networks.