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Bi-wiring with different length wires


wake175m5

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i have a pair of (ULT S1000MT-10/10) and a pair of (ULT S1000MT-15/15) is it ok to bi-wire my L+R speakers with one 10ft and one 15ft wire per speaker? I wasn't sure if it would mess up the timing or anything. They are factory terminated so i dont want to cut down the 15 footer to 10ft.

thanks

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Guest davidness

I'm no expert, but I believe electricity travels at the speed of light, so I don't think 5 feet would make any difference, other than the (extremely small) potential to pick up additional interference.

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so what your saying smith is that i should probably have the electric company run another power line to my house so i can hook up some sort of 480 volt inline booster to make up for the huge time loss over that last 5 feet. then the timing will be perfect and i wont blow up any speakers or burn my house down. hmmm i will probably need some sort of glycol cooling system as well to keep the booster running at optimum temperature too.

in all seriousness i kind of felt like it was a dumb question when i asked it but the ocd in me was starting to flare up so i had to. And thanks to smith i know just how dumb it was!

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so what your saying smith is that i should probably have the electric company run another power line to my house so i can hook up some sort of 480 volt inline booster to make up for the huge time loss over that last 5 feet. then the timing will be perfect and i wont blow up any speakers or burn my house down. hmmm i will probably need some sort of glycol cooling system as well to keep the booster running at optimum temperature too.


in all seriousness i kind of felt like it was a dumb question when i asked it but the ocd in me was starting to flare up so i had to. And thanks to smith i know just how dumb it was!

ah, so you DO understand elite audio and were just testing us!

wasn't trying to make you feel stupid, just didn't want you to miss out on any Audiogon caliber answers. :P

I have my gear in a closet and have 3 different lengths run to LCR, with no issues whatsover, even over tiny 18AWG and 25 ft.

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Light travels at about 1 billion feet per second. 5 feet isn't going to matter. Sound travels at 1125 feet per second, so having a speaker 5 feet farther from you than another wouldn't even matter unless you are extremely sensitive, or what they would call an audiophile. [:)]

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....

Sound travels at 1125 feet per second, so having a speaker 5 feet farther from you than another wouldn't even matter unless you are extremely sensitive, or what they would call an audiophile. Smile

I would not place one speaker 5 feet closer than the other (relative to the listener).

Is that what you meant?

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The speed of electrical transmission is always somewhat less than light in a vacuum. The fraction is called the velocity factor. But nothing to worry about.

In keeping with the figures given above, the signal in the wire travels about one million times faster than the speed of sound traveling from your speaker to your ear.

So if you have one foot of extra wire, this is equivalent to one one-millionth of a foot of distance in the path from the speaker to your ear. Scale as needed.

- - - -

People complain that in the K-Horn, the bass driver is three or four feet behind the driver for the midrange and some delay of the mid is needed (and more for the tweeter). Can we do that with a very long wire?

For each foot of offset we need one million feet of wire. That is 190 miles of wire. If you need to compensate for somewhat greater than three feet, we're talking about a wire reaching from New York to Chicago. That is a lot of wire even if you run it around your basement.

Rough numbers.

Smile,

WMcD

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your sonic mirroing of the temporal sine wave between each binding post will be off by around 1 petasecond per foot. UNLESS of course, these are platinum coated diamond copper wires, in which case the eletricity simply won't flow at all until they are in a synchronous matched pair.

I like it !

I thought it was 1.335 petasecond roughly, the thickness of the platinum could have thrown me off. [:o]

Sorry i don't get the whole bi-wire thing, unless you were using to small of a wire to start, bi-amp yes, I get that.

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....

Sound travels at 1125 feet per second, so having a speaker 5 feet farther from you than another wouldn't even matter unless you are extremely sensitive, or what they would call an audiophile. Smile

I would not place one speaker 5 feet closer than the other (relative to the listener).

Is that what you meant?

yes, that is what I meant. Some times I have company, and cannot sit in the sweet spot. I literally have an X on the floor. [:)]

For those unfortunate few who have guests from time to time, the audiophile tends to be the guest of honor place to plop down. That means the rest of us have to sit on the OS chairs, rockers, loveseats, and occasionally the beanbag chair.

I am kidding of course. I was trying to make a comparison between 5 feet at the speed of light to 5 feet at the speed of sound. yada yada

Craig

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  • 4 weeks later...

first off i gotta say, i love where this thread has gone, it was pretty entertaining reading some of the responses. good job setting the tone smith!

to whoever asked if i meant placing the speaker 5ft closer to me than the other.... no way, i wouldn't even consider doing that, i was talking about length of speaker wire.

ok smith time to test you and everyone else again... 1) if you have a speaker that is rated at 8ohms and you remove the binding post jumpers because you are going to bi-amp them would each speaker connection now be rated at 4ohms?

2) If my receiver(TX-NR807) that I am using as a preamp is unable to bi-amp the center channel but I would like to can I just put a rca splitter on the preamp output and feed two monoblock amps(UPA-1) and then connect the two monoblocks to my speaker(RC-64)? I know usually when you bi-amp a speaker you set the crossover points in your preamp because you are feeding highs and lows separately but because I cant in this case is it bad to send the same, almost full range signals(60Hz-21kHz) to both the high frequency pair of binding posts and the low frequency pair of binding posts?

3) Similar to the second question but if I want to bi-wire my rf-63s and I am driving each of them with a monoblock amp(XPA-1) do I remove the speaker binding post jumpers? I know you remove them if your amp only has one negative binding post and one positive binding post but the Emotiva XPA-1 has two negs and two pos meant for bi-wiring so I wasnt really sure if I should remove the binding post jumpers on the speakers or not.

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so what your saying smith is that i should probably have the electric company run another power line to my house so i can hook up some sort of 480 volt inline booster to make up for the huge time loss over that last 5 feet. then the timing will be perfect and i wont blow up any speakers or burn my house down. hmmm i will probably need some sort of glycol cooling system as well to keep the booster running at optimum temperature too.

in all seriousness i kind of felt like it was a dumb question when i asked it but the ocd in me was starting to flare up so i had to. And thanks to smith i know just how dumb it was!

ah, so you DO understand elite audio and were just testing us!

wasn't trying to make you feel stupid, just didn't want you to miss out on any Audiogon caliber answers. :P

I have my gear in a closet and have 3 different lengths run to LCR, with no issues whatsover, even over tiny 18AWG and 25 ft.

so what your saying smith is that i should probably have the electric company run another power line to my house so i can hook up some sort of 480 volt inline booster to make up for the huge time loss over that last 5 feet. then the timing will be perfect and i wont blow up any speakers or burn my house down. hmmm i will probably need some sort of glycol cooling system as well to keep the booster running at optimum temperature too.

in all seriousness i kind of felt like it was a dumb question when i asked it but the ocd in me was starting to flare up so i had to. And thanks to smith i know just how dumb it was!

ah, so you DO understand elite audio and were just testing us!

wasn't trying to make you feel stupid, just didn't want you to miss out on any Audiogon caliber answers. :P

I have my gear in a closet and have 3 different lengths run to LCR, with no issues whatsover, even over tiny 18AWG and 25 ft.

DId you see that go by ???

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i was being serious. if you want to risk having sh*t audio, then by all means utilize different lengths of cable. if you're serious about this hobby, then you'll understand what i said and why i said it and know that my ears are better than yours, obviously.

(in all sincerity.. i am/was kidding)

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