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In Reply to: Bi-wire vs. single run. posted by gme109 on January 13, 2007 at 07:47:40:
Whether your speaker's crossovers are 'set up for biwiring' or not, the only way to really tell if biwiring is beneficial or not, is to go through only one pair of binding posts when not biwiring. Otherwise you're mixing extra binding posts into the comparison, and not really hearing what the speaker and cable are capable of doing unbiwired.The extra (unneeded) binding posts (typically low quality brass with nickel plating on a high mass connection) will degrade transparency, and throw off your experiment. If you wanted to be fair without going to a single pair of posts when not biwiring, use the four for the non-biwiring. Then when biwiring, ADD a second pair of posts in line to EACH biwired connection, hooked up with the same kind of jumper you used when not biwiring, so that you have 8 binding posts! Get the comparison picture? :) Either way, excess posts throw their effect into the result.
When gme109 went to one pair of posts when not biwiring, his results were greatly improved over biwiring using jumpers, even with upgraded jumpers I think I recall (which still gave him improvements over biwiring). Doing this proper comparision by eliminating the extra posts takes some rewiring however, and many people are not prepared to do that. gme and I explored his tweaking abilities before I made this a strong suggestion. It would be interesting if the fellow with the B&Ws was willing to try this out to really see if his speakers are better biwired or not.
Having sold a heck of a lot of cable, and having a great deal of success in moving people away from biwiring into non-biwiring and hearing their raves about the improvements, my feelings about biwiring include these points:
1) Much of reported improvements from biwiring are likely a result of bypassing a set of poor quality factory supplied jumpers; and of going directly from the cable through a single set of binding posts into the high and low pass circuits of the crossover.
When they tried out NOT biwiring, they were going into one set of posts, then back out through the same binding post via some high-mass convoluted pattern into a jumper, usually of dubious quality, and back in through another binding post again. While better jumpers can greatly improve things, and usually (in my experience) create a more coherent sound than biwired, non-biwired works best if the main cables are hooked up to the proper set of posts before being jumped.
I usually have the best experiences with hooking the main cables to the midrange, jumping to the tweeter on a two-way, or to the bass on a 3-way. Hooking straight to the tweeter posts on a two-way often creates a 'tweeter forward' sound. On 3-ways, bass is much less sensitive to transparency degradation then the mid/tweeter array, which is why I like the mid/tweeter connection hooked up directly. I have also had good results at times with a staggered hookup, where one side (either the + or -) is hooked up with the main cable to the upper post and jumped to the lower, and the other hooked up the opposite way. Whether it's best with the + or the - jumped up or down depends on the polarity relationship designed into the speaker, and how it relates to the polarity of the recording.
2) Biwiring extends your crossover network all the way back to the amp, instead of the signal getting split right at the crossover. I believe this gives a lot of room for signals to become misguided in relation to one another. For instance, what proportion of cable is correct to use to the high pass network side vs. the low side? Are you choking off bass or mid/tweeter energy compared to balancing them properly?
Other physical and electrical properties come into play as well, though harder to define than resistance. There may even be some sort of kick-back effect going on in the opposing wire...something a Sonus Faber technician described to me at length a few years ago that I don't fully recall, but his argument was enough to talk Sonus Faber into making their speakers non-biwireable.
It was interesting to hear the Reynaud comment. Many high-quality cables are designed with consideration of time/group alignments. How startling to hear a speaker designer say something along the lines of a cable that is excellent in term of capacitance resistance and time group propagation will get thrown out of whack when biwiring! That seems to indicate to me a confirmation that if you have a cable that delivers the goods correctly in the first place, that coherence is then lost when biwiring! However, if your cable isn't delivering a coherent signal to begin with, then biwiring may sound better :) I'd put my faith in the going the former route, rather than the latter.
Sometimes with speakers that are of hybrid form in the sense that dynamic drivers are mixed with non-dynamic (such as electrostatic panels with dynamic bass drivers), I consider the possibility it might be better to separate their signals, though I'd rather do it with biamping rather than biwiring...however, in gme's case where he had Seas mid/bass drivers with a 45" Newform Research ribbon, he still got superior results by going non-biwired.
Lastly, I seldom believe any manufacturer or distributor, or even speaker designer who tells me their speaker will sound better biwired than not. I've had far too many results prove them wrong. Do your own experiments, and reach your own conclusions.
Oh, and one further point, if you are going to try going non-biwired on biwireable speakers, and can't switch to a single pair of posts, at least get some quality jumpers!
Follow Ups:
Hi Jeff,This was the first time, when trying biwire vs. non-biwired, that I A) used high quality jumpers instead of the cheap brass platted jumpers that came with the speakers, and B) eliminated the second binding post and jumpers for the final comparison. The latter giving the greatest improvement. Every other time I tried this comparison I was using cheap brass platted jumpers, and as a result, biwiring sounded better, well no wonder! One other thing I wanted to point out, before trying this experiment, I was not too happy with the solid core silver biwired speaker cables I was using. Actually let me back up a little, I was happy with them, until I tried an old pair of Acrotec copper cables I had lying around. The copper Acrotec had a much more pleasing midrange, with richer and more complex harmonics and textures. Although it did lack the silvers clarity, detail, and definition. As a result of this experiment, I became aware of a short coming with my silver speaker cables that I could no longer live with, or so I thought, and thus the search began for new cables. With the non-biwire hook up, the silver cable now has much of the pleasing qualities of the copper Acrotec, along with improvements in EVERY other area. There is nothing quite like the feeling of making an upgrade that costs you zero $'s. Also when I do upgrade my speaker cables, I wont be throwing away money, and quality, by biwiring. Thanks for the advice Jeff!
I really don't mind giving advice that saves my customers money. Just hope I don't go broke doing it :)
Have you read what Richard Vandersteen has to say about biwiring at his web page?Have you experimented with his speakers and biwiring?
...where on Vandersteen's site this is located?
Try this.Answer 7 of the FAQ.
Willis
Vandersteen's explanation has no real accuracy. It's just supposition supported by the use of one hall probe to measure field outside a wire pair.Just because the explanation is without merit doesn't mean biwiring is invalid...just the explanation.
That's what happens when people try to explain what they hear without the benefit of support from the science or engineering community.
IMHO, that sucks. (not the creation of fictional "science", but the lack of support from the scientific community)
Hi.Vendors' offers, snake oils or not, once they are in the right direction of scienftic principles, deserve our consideration with open minds.
Like a $500 wooden knob, which the vendors claim they improves the sound. It could be dismissed as a money-quest joke.
But second thought on its claim basing on lowering the resonance frequency of the overall volume control tracking movement would deserve more skeptical thinking.
I go for Vandersteen's explanation of bi-wring can reduce the hi/lo audio frequency intermoduation along the same common conductors.
His explanation, scientifically PROVEN or not, could be a matter of time. Who can definetely say no todate?I've proven this is true to many audiophiles' golden ears, including my rusted pair, with my own speaker systems along with quite a few
expensive brandname makes which I upgraded from single-wired to bi-wired & tri-wired in these years. Bi-wiring or tri-wiring sound better than single wiring. This is my hands-on experience.Of course, I rebuilt the cross-over networks involved from standard factory single-wired to bi/tri-wired to provide genuine multi-wiring instead of quasi-bi-wiring using a jumper.
c-J
cj: ""
Vendors' offers, snake oils or not, once they are in the right direction of scienftic principles, deserve our consideration with open minds.""Anecdotal accounts of audibility deserve the consideration. Explanations without scientific foundation deserve only scrutiny. If the explanation wanders out of reality at the jump, it deserves only to be trashed, as acceptance of ridiculous explanations leads us away from reality.
For example, the use of a hall probe to detect the external magnetic field of a wire, while impressive to the layman, does nothing to float my boat.. The external magnetic field of a wire pair is easily calculated out ten decimal places, and has been for half a century now. Mention of a hall probe is floobydust, meant to impress.
Once the actual mag field is understood, then the next thing I see..the recommendation to keep the second wire pair a foot away, becomes just trivially silly. Twisting one of them negates that, as does using a star quad configuration correctly, where the magnetic fields are orthogonal and not coupling.
The explanation given is useless, and in fact is worse than that, as it misleads. (not the consumer, they don't really know enough of this tech garbage to care, but for V-man himself, it eliminates the forward path).
cj: ""
I go for Vandersteen's explanation of bi-wring can reduce the hi/lo audio frequency intermoduation along the same common conductors.
His explanation, scientifically PROVEN or not, could be a matter of time. Who can definetely say no todate?""His explanation of fields and interaction with the wires is easily proven incorrect, even by simple thought experiments. The explanation only serves to redirect analysis away from what is really going on. So I can easily say it is incorrect.
cj: ""
I've proven this is true to many audiophiles' golden ears, including my rusted pair, with my own speaker systems along with quite a few
expensive brandname makes which I upgraded from single-wired to bi-wired & tri-wired in these years. Bi-wiring or tri-wiring sound better than single wiring. This is my hands-on experience""I value the anecdotal experience and accounts of people such as yourself far more than I do a scientifically unsupported and misguided "tech note" or "white paper". Those are the bane to advancement.
Cheers, John
This would call for a true shotgun wire that is separable. Is there such a cable? There are a few shotgun cables, but they are mostly fastened together in some way I believe. And considering the cost, most don't buy them when they think they can get similar performance from a single biwire cable which is a little over half the cost
I only use my gun whenever kindness fails
Here is the quote from the FAQ:http://www.vandersteen.com/pages/Answr7.htm
With the high-current signal (Bass) separated from the low-current signal (Treble) this small signal modulation was eliminated as long as the cables were separated by at least an inch or two. (To keep the treble cable out of the field surrounding the bass cable.)
Willis: ""
Here is the quote from the FAQ:
http://www.vandersteen.com/pages/Answr7.htm
With the high-current signal (Bass) separated from the low-current signal (Treble) this small signal modulation was eliminated as long as the cables were separated by at least an inch or two. (To keep the treble cable out of the field surrounding the bass cable.)""
The statement you quote gives the appearance that there actually is merit to their assertion. That is unsupported by their site. What they did say is this:
""We believe that this dynamic field modulates the smaller signals, especially the very low level treble frequencies.""No proof, just one hall probe measurement..
It's all just supposition without measurement.
They are, of course, somewhat in the correct direction. But the explanation is off base, leading to incorrect conclusions.
You can take your discussion about the lack of scientific rigor to Mr. Vandersteen at the following:http://www.vandersteen.com/pages/Techpage1.html
Why do I feel that you have a plastic pocket protector?
willis: ""
You can take your discussion about the lack of scientific rigor to Mr. Vandersteen at the following:
http://www.vandersteen.com/pages/Techpage1.html""And what would that serve? I've handed rigorously accurate derivations of this stuff to vendors like him, to application and design engineers at some of the biggest audio companies around, and the end result?? pfffft.
Vendors such as Vandersteen do not care. And, WHY SHOULD THEY? The verbage on his site is full of theoretical holes big enough to drive a truck through...What market advantage would be gained by fixing it? Reality is rarely sexy, and doesn't feed the kids.. I cannot blame him, nor any other high end vendors for ignoring the rigorously accurate equations and the ramifications to their product lines.. If the equations clearly explain what is going on with respect to biwiring, and COMPLETELY AGREE WITH AUDIBILITY EXPERIENCE reported by the vendor, it lacks a certain, shall we say, "curb appeal".
I've posted the correct equations and discussion at many different forums, with the expectation that any vendor who really cares, can pick it up and use it to better their product, while dispelling ridiculous myths. Unfortunately, the myths are far sexier to the customer.
willis: ""
Why do I feel that you have a plastic pocket protector?""Why do you say it with disdain?
I was geeky long before it was socially acceptable to be so. Now, with all the hacker kids, the bluetooth stuff, the mp3, the internet, being a geek isn't so special...:-(
Understanding e/m field theory doesn't make one a social outcast. Accusing me of owning a "pocket protector" appears as just a defense mechanism of yours..besides, I've never owned one..and kidded my friends in grad school for using them.. called em "poindexters", don't think anybody here remembers that term...
Bottom line: discussion with the vendors has proven useless, they don't think it will help their bottom line, and I agree with them..the consumer needs to change first. The vendors will provide a technical explanation commensurate with their customer's expectations.
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