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Is bi-wiring worth it?


Marios

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My RF-3 have dual terminals, since I aquired enough length quality cable recently, is it worth to run 2 seperate cables from my amp's terminals to the seperate connections on the speakers or is the whole "bi-wiring" thing just a myth?

 

Sure would be easier and cleaner to run just one cable and give the rest to my friend, but if it does make a difference, what are your experiences?

 

Thanks.

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17 minutes ago, Marios said:

Sure would be easier and cleaner to run just one cable and give the rest to my friend, but if it does make a difference, what are your experiences?

I think it would be WAY more valuable to give the remaining speaker wire to your friend. Make sure the jumpers between terminals are in place.

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The overwhelming consensus 99% from my last two years of reading multiple audio websites is that bi-wiring adds nothing to the sound quality.

 

My personal experience trying both bi-wiring and passive bi-amping from my AVR which specifically supports bi-amping is that maybe it adds a little mid-range detail, but it is very subtle at best.  I am very sure if my Klipsch CF-4s were bi-amped or not in a blind listening test, I could not tell if the speakers were bi-amped or not.

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48 minutes ago, jjptkd said:

 

Do you use two different model amps or two of the same amps?

 

Never tried with the two of the same model. 

 

Right now I have a nice Denon 3805 AVR acting as preamp and powering the woofers with ~140 watts, preout going to Adcom GFA545 running the mids and highs. 

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Mostly it's twice the cost for the same sound. I have never tried tailoring the wires to the drivers though. I could see some possibilities for tuning the high end with a different cable set but it would take a lot of experimentation and a lot of different cables. (Easy for me because I have stuff sitting around) but if that is not your situation, it would be an expensive experiment. 

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Get the right gauge wire to start with and it is not necessary and there is no solid proof it does anything after all these years.  If it really worked, there would be tons of papers supporting it.  Be careful of sporadic personal reports.  Bi-wiring has been around for a long time and it not something difficult to study and the audio gurus have just overlooked it.

 

The only time it makes sense to use to set of wires is in active bi-amping.  As you can tell, I not a believer of passive bi-amping.

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27 minutes ago, derrickdj1 said:

The only time it makes sense to use to set of wires is in active bi-amping.  As you can tell, I not a believer of passive bi-amping.

 

At the very minimum passive bi-amping can get more watts to your speakers.

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9 hours ago, jjptkd said:

At the very minimum passive bi-amping can get more watts to your speakers.

How? The exact signal is sent to both drivers.  Whatever is not needed by a particular driver is dissipated as heat in the passive XO.

 

Now this favors using bi-amping with an electronic XO where a less powerful amp can be used on the tweeter and a more robust amp for the woofer.  Even then it not the amplification that is solely responsible for the improved fidelity.  The drivers must be aligned with their more precise electronic XO. 

 

Anyone doing passive bi-amping will be surprised how easy it is to switch to active.  They already have the expensive part out of the way since they already have two amps.

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I have always tried to wrap my head around "bi-wiring."

 

If electricity travels at the speed of light and the source for each input to the high and low frequency drivers is the same, how is it any different than jumper strips at the speaker? It is effect a 16 foot long 12 guage (in my case) jumper, for an eight foot long bi-wire.

 

I found no difference in the sound with bi-wiring. And I really wanted to!

 

However, when I bi-amped the same set of speakers, in this case PSB Stratus Silver I's, the difference was readily apparent.

 

Anybody out there find a benefit to bi-wiring?

 

 

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