The jumper plate
 

Is the OEM jumper plate any good on SF? What's it made of?
Or is that the first thing you tweak?
I'm toying with cables, and I'm wondering if it's better to buywire, or replace the jumpers with cardas or something similar.

I'v got experience with Sf.
If you buy good jumpers (I sugest Nordost Valhalla jumpers to Sf) it will be better but the plate works quite alright. Not the first thing I would upgrade.

I'll bite. What's the first thing I should upgrade?

For me, I prefer to skip the jumpers via going single/biwire on the speaker cables.

Bi-wires
 

Drop the jumpers, go to bi-wire!

That's one way.

:D

I don't know your system. Maybe you are done with everything else. If not, consider this as general rules (my rules) in this order that could carefully be altered in some systems due to performance.
-Almost every cable is important. I would upgrade cables, powercobles interconnect and speaker cables first.
-Get clean power in whatever way you can (could be power conditioners etc). That is what everthing in your system has to deal with. Clean power exactly when the amps needs it is a big deal.
-Get the system a quiet and stable electrical ground. More important then some could guess. (Entreq and Nordost knows about this and have som good products, there are som ethers to)
-Get good acoustic environment in your listening room. It does not matter how good your system is if the acoustic pollute the sound on the way to your ears.
- Your speaker are good for sure so take your time picking good preamp and amp (ore a great integrated amp) and hopefully a good turntable and RIIA. Digital source could work but not all the way.
-Almost every cable is important. I would upgrade cables, powercables (very important), tunearm-cable (is maybe the most important cable in the system), and speaker cables.
- Place this in a good way and that is good feet and a great rack.

Then you system will be almost as good as it gets.

At this point I would consider better jumpers. :thumbsup:

Getting my point?



Respectfully
/Apexorca

System
MX122 Mc Home theater preamp
MC8207 7 channel pro amp.
Oppo 203
SF O3 Main and Center, rears are Jamo soon to be B&W in ceiling 7.3
Panamax M5400-EX, considering replacing with Shunyata or Mc MPC-1500
Velodyne 10" optima sub, I also am researching a proper replacement for a giant room.

Cables
Audioquest power outlets with silver plated contacts, on order
Power cables are all OEM, one Shunyata Delta NF is on order to test
XLR interconnects is Audioquest Mackenzie, one of which is probably bad
Speaker wire is between blue jeans biwired with locking bananas (surprisingly good quality), and I have a set of Audioquest Rocket 88 bulk wire cut and terminated by my local dealer not-biwired (surprisingly poor quality) I blind tested my wife and the blue jeans sounds much better to her, very different sound.

I had a talk with Norsdost represented at a booth with the local nordost dealer at the RMAF. They do not like biwire and claim it actually hurts phase shift or something like that. They want me to buy their jumper cables. I also had a long talk with Shunyata, they didn't have a preference for normal or biwire and stated the speaker itself is indicative of the necessity of normal or biwire. If the internal crossovers are shared than it really doesn't matter, if they aren't shared then the speaker will benefit. (I'm paraphrasing here and I might not understand it perfectly) He did say that biwire fetches less on the second hand market if that matters to me.

I'm over-researching cables and equipment because a proper inroom demo is not available to me. I have to rely on the opinions of my peers; and facts and pricing from the manufacturers.

No in-room treatment. The space is a theater, pool table, and bar area in a walk-out basement. It's roughly 1,000 sq ft or more. Lots of bass nulls and two nodes(?). Which is why I'm looking into having two large subs.

+1 on all this great advice.

Long story short, I have done a lot with internal bi-wire, shotgun bi-wire, normal amping, vertical and horizonal bi-amping over the years. If your speakers are such that they benefit from bi-wire there are some benefits.

However,....the best sounding configs I've ever had, and presently still have are best when the absolutely best set of speaker cables you can muster are used full range with a matching or superior set of jumpers from the same manufacturer.

I'm also in the camp to upgrade the jumpers. I'm using Transparent Reference jumpers to match the rest of my system wires. It resulted in a perceived improvement in both bass and midrange, increased clarity throughout and slightly greater dynamics.