Bi-Wire yes or no

ewbuster

Hello,

I have been searching on the forums but have not really found a clear answer. Is it worth the money to bi-wire my fronts. I just picked up a set of monitor 70s and 40s since they were on sale. I would also like to keep the budget low if I can. On bluejeans i can get 10 feet of bi-wired Canare 4S11 for $40. Is this good cable? Also should I spend the extra money and buy better cables or get non bi-wire cable?

Iam fine with paying $40 or even more for a cable, but I would like to know if this is good before I go out and waste my money on it.

Thanks for the input.

Zitro

Are you one who buys into the whole "high end' cable thing? I personally don't; seems gauge matters more than brand or material and stranded over solid core. If you aren't big into "brand" cables, go to Home Depot and buy several feet of their $0.48 per foot 14 gauge speaker wire. Hook up your speakers w/single wire, then bi-wire them and see if it makes a difference to you.

kawizx9r

Hey ewbuster,

some of the guys here especially like that canare stuff for DIY speaker cables since it holds up well and performs great for the buck.

I personally do believe in 'better speaker cable/etc.' gig from first hand experience. My first upgrade was with BJC's Belden5000 wire when I got rid of my old monoprice and Monster XP speaker wire. Bass immediately improved but I wasn't sure about the mids/highs. It was still an upgrade nonetheless and as you can see now I upgraded to some of MITs affordable stuff. That'll change in the future as well I promise ya

If I were you though, I'd save my money and go with the single wire ends.

Btw, welcome to CP.

danz1906

Welcome to the Club!

Go for the Bi-wire.

ewbuster

A quick question about Bi-Wiring. The correct way to bi-wire is to get the cables with 2 connectors for the receiver and 4 connectors for the speakers, correct? This means the two positive ends come out of the same port on the receiver but then split before going into the speaker. I just want to make sure iam understanding this correctly and buying the right cables.

TNRabbit

BiAMPING can make a difference (varies according to each system), but biWIRING is a gimmick made up by wire manufacturers....IMNSHO

ewbuster

I saw these AQ type 4 cables for sale. Is this a good price for these cables?

http://www.polkaudio.com/forums/showthread.php?t=90449

Also I know this is all personal preference but is there a big difference in getting the AQ type 4 cable over the BJC 4S11?

ben62670

Zitro wrote: »

Are you one who buys into the whole "high end' cable thing? I personally don't; seems gauge matters more than brand or material and stranded over solid core. If you aren't big into "brand" cables, go to Home Depot and buy several feet of their $0.48 per foot 14 gauge speaker wire. Hook up your speakers w/single wire, then bi-wire them and see if it makes a difference to you.

So far from the truth it isn't funny.
A: Good cables can be had at a decent price
B: Good cables tend to take longer to burn-in.
C: Gauge is much less important than you think. My AQ Type 4's are around 17ga.
Construction and material are way more important than Ga.
E: Home depot wire sucks bad. It will most likely turn green, and belongs in the dumpster
F: You said "seems that gauge matters more than brand or material and stranded over solid core" Sounds like you don't have much experience with better gear.

Keiko said it best, and I second his post.

John K.

EW, welcome to Club Polk. Your understanding of bi-wiring, as detailed in your second post, isn't entirely correct. Any two-way speaker has to have the wiring split to feed the high and low frequency sections separately. With normal single external wiring the split occurs inside the speaker enclosure to allow the high and low frequency sections of the crossover to each receive a feed. Bi-wiring simply moves this split point back to the output terminal on the receiver/amplifier. This is of no significant difference electrically.

As to your broader question about speaker wiring, an often-cited explanation of this by a veteran audio professional is found here . This has been of enormous help to many beginning listeners over the past few years in avoiding the wire charlatans who abound in our hobby. Ordinary wire(regardless of whether it's called lamp cord, power cord, zip cord, speaker wire, or whatever)of adequate gauge and costing maybe 20 or 30 cents a foot does this very simple electrical job as well as it can be done. Local electrical suppliers such as Home Depot and Lowes are a good source and low-cost suppliers such as MonoPrice are available online.

CoolJazz

John K. wrote: »

Bi-wiring simply moves this split point back to the output terminal on the receiver/amplifier. This is of no significant difference electrically.

Wrong! The impedance of the wire from the amp output terminals to the input of the crossover comes into play. It can, depending on several key variables, be audible or not.

John K. wrote: »

As to your broader question about speaker wiring, an often-cited explanation of this by a veteran audio professional is found here . This has been of enormous help to many beginning listeners over the past few years in avoiding the wire charlatans who abound in our hobby. Ordinary wire(regardless of whether it's called lamp cord, power cord, zip cord, speaker wire, or whatever)of adequate gauge and costing maybe 20 or 30 cents a foot does this very simple electrical job as well as it can be done. Local electrical suppliers such as Home Depot and Lowes are a good source and low-cost suppliers such as MonoPrice are available online.

...And it has deluded many more and caused an unbelievable number of people to miss untold better quality enjoyment from their systems. Sorry you've allowed yourself to be equally fooled John K!

CoolJazz

jparker82

I added Nordost Blue heaven rev2 bi-wire to lsi 25's and Center and it really seemed to wake them up.

ben62670

Special K strikes again now calling us charlatans. He and woger wussell are fools to think that they can tell us what we can or can not hear. Everyone is different. Again I can't tell the difference between good and cheap wine. Bottom line if you can't hear a difference sell the cable for what you put into them and move on.
Ben

Zitro

Bi-wiring my M30's didn't do much, except calm down the tweeter a bit. Replacing the stock jumpers seemed to have more of a benefit.

Zitro

ben62670 wrote: »

So far from the truth it isn't funny.
A: Good cables can be had at a decent price
B: Good cables tend to take longer to burn-in.
C: Gauge is much less important than you think. My AQ Type 4's are around 17ga.
Construction and material are way more important than Ga.
E: Home depot wire sucks bad. It will most likely turn green, and belongs in the dumpster
F: You said "seems that gauge matters more than brand or material and stranded over solid core" Sounds like you don't have much experience with better gear.

Keiko said it best, and I second his post.

In my experience, I disagree, and gauge DOES make a big difference (unless the run in short enough to make the difference negligible). You can't argue the physics of electrical signal transfer. There is plenty of debate as to the importance of speaker wire, what makes a "good" wire, and there is no set "truth". Many things in audiophilia are subjective anyways. I'll be dumping money into good source material before I buy "exotic" speaker wire.

Zitro

Edit: Let me say that I'm not saying that I don't believe speaker wire makes a difference, because it does. What I disagree with is peoples assumption that more expensive wire is automatically better. My dad is an electrical engineer and one of his work friends actually used to work for Audioquest and we all have discussed this, and even he said a lot of the hoopla over cables is junk. There are great cheap cable and **** costly cable. Producing a cable that transmits a clean signal is not expensive.

ben62670

Zitro wrote: »

Edit: Let me say that I'm not saying that I don't believe speaker wire makes a difference, because it does. What I disagree with is peoples assumption that more expensive wire is automatically better. My dad is an electrical engineer and one of his work friends actually used to work for Audioquest and we all have discussed this, and even he said a lot of the hoopla over cables is junk. There are great cheap cable and **** costly cable. Producing a cable that transmits a clean signal is not expensive.

A: Nobody here thinks that the price dictates how good the wire is. Yes you usually get what you pay for, but there are some great deals out there.
B: My AQ wire is very small guage and it sounds better than most heavier wires.
C: My dad is a TV repair man. He has a bitchen set of tools.

Zitro

ben62670 wrote: »

A: Nobody here thinks that the price dictates how good the wire is. Yes you usually get what you pay for, but there are some great deals out there.
B: My AQ wire is very small guage and it sounds better than most heavier wires.
C: My dad is a TV repair man. He has a bitchen set of tools.

I'm not sure you can ever have too many good tools...

I actually noticed MUCH more of a sonic difference when I switched from cheapo interconnect to Audioquest Viper I/C then I did switching from cheapo speaker wire to Audioquest speaker wire. Maybe my NAD equipment is more sensitive to good cables then my speakers are?

kolyan2k

TNRabbit wrote: »

BiAMPING can make a difference (varies according to each system), but biWIRING is a gimmick made up by wire manufacturers....IMNSHO

+1 this is true !

ben62670

IC's make more of a difference than speaker cables. My buddy and I used some AR IC's and we thought something was very wrong. I put my cables in the loop and the SDA came back, and the highs returned.

kawizx9r

ben62670 wrote: »

IC's make more of a difference than speaker cables. My buddy and I used some AR IC's and we thought something was very wrong. I put my cables in the loop and the SDA came back, and the highs returned.

+1
Been told this plenty of times as well. IC's provide an even bigger difference than speaker cables do and I've learned that firsthand.

sTiLlLeArNiNg

bi-wiring/amping is worth it IMHO.

If you want to get a boost without spending much cash get a decent/good set of cable's, prefferably in bulk to save $$, and run those but yank the stock brass jumper plate's and replace them with a small section of speaker wire

ewbuster

thanks for the input guys. I think iam just going to get some cable from bluejeans and do single ends with jumpers on the speakers. I may upgrade cables later when I have more money to spend.

Should I use the 4S11 to jump on the speakers or should I use smaller cable, like 14-16awg?

Mon40CSMM10

Here's my opinion on Bi-wiring: the slightly added bass presence and slightly increased high end presence is small.

If one is going to Bi-wire from the very start, sure, go ahead and do it--don't forget to remove the metal jumpers from the speakers.

If one is going to retroactively Bi-wire, having to turn the AVR around and then deal with all the other wires just to Bi-wire (and hopefully not accidentally disconnecting other wires or having them pull out of the twist-on banana plugs)--forget it, it's not worth the extra effort.

BlueFox

ewbuster wrote: »

Iam fine with paying $40 or even more for a cable, but I would like to know if this is good before I go out and waste my money on it.

Generally speaking, $40 worth of speaker wire goes with $300 electronics and speakers. Of course, with that level of equipment the wire is basically irrelevent.

You didn't mention your electronics, but if they are capable of extracting the nuances in the recording you will want to upgrade your speakers, and the cable. Believe it or not, every link in a system is a component, and each link can have a dramatic effect, good or bad, on the sound quality.

Of course you will also need to acousticaly treat your listening room, and isolate vibrations from the electronics in order to get the best results from your system.

Aren't you glad you asked a simple question.

Zitro

Has anyone here actually used the Canare 4S11 cable? Looking into getting some myself. At $1.35 a foot, I wouldn't mind giving it a shot if its worth it.

sTiLlLeArNiNg

Quite a few people run the Canare 4s11 with very good result's Here is a thread i made showing my build http://www.polkaudio.com/forums/showthread.php?t=91657

You can get the Canare for $1.19/ft from Markertek ya just need to phone in

F1nut

Pricing wire by the foot is rather silly. I mean, do you ever hear of anyone pricing their SS amp by the number of output devices or their tube amp by the number of power tubes? Of course not, that would be silly.

Mon40CSMM10

In places where they have large spools of wire or cable, pricing by the foot is actually quite common. Hardware stores and larger electronics stores are two such examples.

In other cases, one can by a smaller spool of wire at a fixed price, but then the math would still come out to the price by the foot. If the store doesn't have a high end audio section or consumer audio section, there's always the car audio section.

The 50 feet of Canare 4S11 cable at $1.35 a foot = $67.50. Very likely, that's 50 feet from a much larger diameter spool, which is why they are pricing it by the foot.

Another example, 50 feet of 16 gauge Royal Cable (RSW16GCP50) at $12.99 for the entire 50 foot spool, that can also be expressed as being $0.26 a foot; however, there isn't any practical way not to get the entire 50 foot spool of that cable.

F1nut

Yes, I realize that any wire or cable product can be broken down into a price per foot. However, I prefer the way that most, if not all, the better audio cable companies price their cables. For example, a pair of 8 foot speaker cables from XYZ Cable Company cost $1000.00. Why the need to break it down to a price by the foot...that's silly.

hearingimpared

xcapri79 wrote: »

Unlike an amplifier, a cable has consistent physical properties thoughout it's length. The first foot is the same as the last foot and all the feet in betwen. Hence it is entirely logical and practical to price it in that manner. The price per unit length allows one to compare relative prices for different spool sizes.

That is true though only after the cable has been burned in.

Zitro

F1nut wrote: »

Yes, I realize that any wire or cable product can be broken down into a price per foot. However, I prefer the way that most, if not all, the better audio cable companies price their cables. For example, a pair of 8 foot speaker cables from XYZ Cable Company cost $1000.00. Why the need to break it down to a price by the foot...that's silly.

Not everybody needs 8 feet of speaker wire per speaker...I like buying by the foot because it allows you to buy just what you need for your rig. Everyone's setup is positioned differently, so why not just buy what you need and not what the company says you need? For my setup, I'd only need 1 pair of 4 ft. and one pair of 7 ft. So that's $32.40 for all the wire I need...so why would I want to spend $60+ for a 50 foot spool when I wouldn't use half of it?