where to put this thread? here?? oh well..

[Marty01]

bi-wiring...

i have a question about this.. wouldnt the load at the amp/receiver whatever you got.. be that of a parallel setup?? as in.. (i have 8ohm speakers) 2 8 ohms run in parrallel? so a 4 ohm load? what makes it not so?? i fail to comprehend!!!

[N. Abstentia]

No because when you bi-wire, the drivers are separated by a crossover. There are no overlapping frequencies, so the impedance is not halved.

When you wire a pair of 8 ohm speaker systems in parallel, both speakers are expected to reproduce the same fequencies so the impedance is halved because the amp has to do twice as much work.

[Marty01]

hmm. maybe ive misunderstood... what i had understood its running 2 sets of wires, litle smaller guage (14ga insead of 12ga) to the same speaker .. if this isnt bi-wiring.. the anything with a crossover setup is biwiring?

[N. Abstentia]

Bi-wiring means that you run 2 speakers wires to one speaker system..one wire for the woofer and one wire for the tweeter. Theoretically this helps because since the other end of the wire is hooked to the respective crossovers, the woofer wire does not have to carry the tweeter frequencies and the tweeter does not carry the woofer frequencies.

Now, that's the theory. Does it work? I don't know. That's another arguement.

Personally, I can't see much benefit from bi-wiring, but bi-amping I can understand. That's using a seperate amp for the woofers and tweeters..which is what I do

[Monstrous Mike]

bi-wiring...

i have a question about this.. wouldnt the load at the amp/receiver whatever you got.. be that of a parallel setup?? as in.. (i have 8ohm speakers) 2 8 ohms run in parrallel? so a 4 ohm load? what makes it not so?? i fail to comprehend!!!

Let's examine the crossover network inside a speaker. You basically attach one speaker wire to the two leads on the back of the speaker. Inside, this is connected to the crossover network. Inside the crossover network, the signal is split like a Y connection. One fork goes to the high pass filter which then goes to the tweeter. The other fork goes to the low pass filter which then feeds the woofer.

In biwiring, this Y split in the crossover is separated and attached to two sets of terminals outside the speaker (that is, each fork of the Y now has its own speaker terminal connection). Now, you can either have a metal jumper connecting the two sets of terminals and one speaker wire, or you can remove the metal jumper and run two separate sets of speaker wires which are joined at the speaker output of the amp.

So basically, without biwiring the forks in the Y split are short and the tail is long. In biwiring, the forks are long and the tail is only the twisting of the two wires at the back of the amp.

In the end, the amp doesn't see two speakers in parallel. It only sees any added or decreased resistance due to the different wires being used and in practical terms this resistance is a lot less than 8 ohms so not much really changes other than you have bought more speaker wire than you probably need.