Speaker cables single vs bi-wire
 

I have an opportunity to upgrade my speaker cables (currently 5-year-old Ztron Cobras) before the end of the year to Alphas (Sigma are out of the budget unfortunately.) I can do either single or bi-wire to my Amati Futuras. I’ve never bi-wired before, anyone have any thoughts on what the improvement might be and whether it’s worth doing?

This will be interesting.

Speaker cables single vs bi-wire
 

Hey Tony,

To me, that’s slightly ambiguous because of the way the term is thrown around so much. Paint a picture of both ends of the current cable(s) and the proposed cable(s).

Tony - this is a controversial topic....you can read all kinds of opinions as to whether or not it makes a difference. Some speaker manufacturers will recommend it while others say it’s not important. I don’t think you would have a clear cut answer in your system unless you tried it in home. Any way that you could do an in home demo before buying? If I were buying new cables anyway and my speakers were bi-wireable, I probably would go ahead if the price difference wasn’t a big deal but if they were way more expensive I probably wouldn’t without a trial.

- Buck

Tony....I’m in the camp of Bi-wire makes a difference. Just make sure it’s a true Bi-wire. You need to have two separate pairs of speaker cables. Not the Bi-wire like Wireworld offers.

I previously used the Bi-wire speakers cables from Wireworld and thought they sounded great until I ran two separate Wireworld cables. The music opened up and had more impact.

ditto. and of course if you have speakers and jumpers etc to remove to take advantage of. Cant hurt separate signals to the mids and tweeters and woofers.

Ivan has some tri-wire gear I recall too go for it and enjoy! :)

Shunyata’s bi-wiring would be 1 connector at the amp, diverging to two cables inside the insulation, ending in two terminations at the speaker. The price difference isn’t that great, about a grand, but there’s no way to audition since I need a custom length (4.5 meters).

One of my upcoming projects is to bi-wire my Amati Futura's. I am currently running the stock jumpers and a single cable to each speaker. The biggest improvement I've achieved so far is to ditch all the banana plugs and switch to spades. This will be interesting.

Tom... Ditch the stock jumpers for another big improvement. :yes:

The theory behind bi-wiring is this:

Even if your cables have very low resistance and inductance, they appear in series between the amplifier and your speaker. Many speakers have significant impedance dips in the bass region. By running separate cables from the amp to the HF and LF speaker terminals, the current from the LF signals does not flow through the HF cable. So any cable-induced anomalies from the LF current are separated from the signal driving the HF drivers.

What makes this even more compelling is that bass drivers are non-linear and act as a kind of a diode, needing more current to move the cone in one direction than the other. This non-linear behavior manifests itself in higher distortion at the speaker end of the cable than at the amplifier end.