Bi-wire strikes back

Well, I finally had some good play time with my new RT800i's to experiment. So I busted out some Monster XP (on sale, so I said, why not?) and decided to do some listening tests on bi-wiring on these guys.

The setup:

Just as Juice did, I hooked up each 800 to the left channel on A and B speaker sets. To start I ran samples using 4 CDs with 14 awg lamp cord vs. the 14 awg Monster XP. The CDs were:

Radiohead-Ok Computer (nice bright guitars, good mix of strings, electronics, and traditional music instruments)
Beck-Mutations (twangy acoustic guitar and very personal vocal performance...you can hear the sliding of his tongue on his lips and the crackle of his throat perfectly)
Jimmy Hendrix- Are you Experienced? (older source material, recording is aged, but great clarity of the bass guitar, drums, and vocals)
Miles Davis- Ballads and Blues (very lifelike brass reproduction, piano and standup bass, there's a lot going on here)

To get my ears aquianted to the listening material I played all the CDs quickly to listen for points of inspection, and a base to play from. I found very little difference in sound quality between the lamp cord and the monster...the monster did boast a slight advantage in the midrange and bass....but this also made the CDs sound slightly more 'recorded' than the lamp, the bass did show a little more responsiveness however. I decided to use the monster in the tests.

The test:

Wiring one 800 to channel A with the gold connectors on, the other was bi-wired to channel B with the connectors off, of course. I opted to use bare wire for the process, as I don't normally use banana plugs anyhow, and I generally feel bare wire is best. I was going to solder the reciever end of the bi-wire, but I opted to leave that bare as well. During each track, I switched back and forth between channels and payed close attention to points I had marked beforehand as especially delicate. I didn't have the opportunity to perform the test double-blind, since I was alone

Radiohead: Thom Yorke has a very distintive voice, and can reach high notes that make Michael Jackson cringe. I found that the bi-wired speaker had much more pronounciation than the other. I found that MOST 'levels', such as the bass and treble, remained largely the same. The seperation of the instruments was immediatley more pronounced, however. I particularly notice almost a loss in some midrange frequencies...Right under some of the Cs and Ds of the guitar, I found they had slightly less underneath them. It did allow me to hear some reverberations in the strings that I didn't hear as clearly in the other speaker...but I wondered if this was at the expence of a lost frequency? At any rate the bi-wired 800 was much more live than the other.
Beck: on this disk I heard the most difference in Beck's well recorded voice. It was crisper, with a more revealing nature. The seperation of the other instruments was not quite as significant as the Radiohead disc, but occasionally you could hear a difference.
Jimmy Hendrix: Jimmy was way more pronounced than before. The bi-wire turned this recording into something new....it sounded so live. Particularly the drums and bass guitar just jumped out at different angles. Where before, I only heard deep notes from the bass guitar, now I heard the twang of the strings and in some cases, his finger passing the fretboard. That, I thought, was rare in such a low frequency instrument.
Miles Davis: I noticed the lack of that mid range again in this disc, coming from some of the mid-range notes of the brass. Once again, I did hear OTHER sounds more clearly because of this, but I again wondered at what expense.

After some thinking and some double checking I began to wonder about this 'sameness' characteristic that had been posted here. I can almost see what they were saying....each recording had a certain quality that was consistant through the bi-wiring. However, what that quality was....it was seperation. The instruments jumped apart...the vocals, guitars, brass, and rythm distanced themselves from each other. The result is, this speaker sounded active...were before it was simply reproducing what it was given. I decided after all the bi-wire was a great improvement, letting the speaker do what it is really trying to: create a realistic sound experience. My cs400 is now bi-wired as well! At any rate, it's not a permanent mod, so if I ever decide I want it back the other way, I'll be ok!

john