Partly new and partly word for word from another post I made today:

Most of us are in the habit of not attacking one another, just sharing ideas and experiences, sometimes passionately, sometimes not reaching the same conclusions – but even Outlaws can show respect and often a smile!

My training and experience leads me to somewhat disagree with Stringreen. But I do realize that he and I work with a different set-up in a different environment. Improvement generally comes from two areas: finding a better way of doing something; overcoming problems or limitations. The combination of system/environment variables that Stringreen has may have been noticeably helped by bi-wiring, whereas my system was not. Similarly for changing power cords and other tweaks I find dubious, but I'll try to stay on topic.

Sites for more reading:

The Cobalt Cables web site does not advocate bi-wiring apart from bi-amplification (second half of page): http://www.cobaltcable.com/which/speaker_connections.htm Yet other cable manufacturers that sell bi-wire products do advocate bi-wiring (at increased cost).

Some pros and cons of bi-wiring, mildly technical: http://www.sonicdesign.se/biwire.html After reviewing this information, as I see it, as the lower the resistance/reactance of the speaker wire, both the damping problems and the phase shift problems are minimized, therefore a low resistance, low reactance cable helps whether you bi-wire or not, and both the pros and cons for bi-wiring reach a point of no return as the cable becomes less of an issue. Maintaining damping and signal coherence at the actual drivers is an issue, starting with excellent amplifier damping, preserved as the signal passes through a cable with very low resistance/reactance, and avoiding as much reactance/resistance as possible in the passive crossover, or eliminating the passive crossover altogether.

While the active crossover method introduces a level of complexity and significantly increased expense for both an active crossover network and more channels of amplification, if the active crossover provides the frequency dividing, response shaping and time alignment needed by a particular arrangement of drivers, the direct connection of an amplifier output to each driver provides both better accuracy and power transfer than passive crossover components allow when they are between amplifier and driver.

Most of us are at the other end of the spectrum with a single channel of amplification per loudspeaker and two-way or three-way passive crossovers in our speaker enclosures. Our exposure to active crossover application is limited to the pre/pro or receiver that separates and provides a mono or stereo signal for subwoofers.

My loudspeakers are three-way and have two sets of binding posts, one for lows and one for mids/highs. I have experimented with bi-wiring and split feed (no active crossover) bi-amplification and found no marked improvement over the usual common feed method. In my opinion finding little or no audible change was a testament to three, possibly four factors: the Outlaw amplification is of very high quality such that it drives a full range load just fine, splitting the frequency loads above 80Hz (the subwoofer crossover point set in the pre/pro) was not an aid to amplifier performance; the speaker wire in use introduced no problems that were helped by carrying certain ranges of frequencies separately; the passive crossover components were still between the amplifier and drivers; the rest of the variables present, there are plenty from source material to listening environment, were such that they overshadowed any differences.

As mentioned elsewhere in this forum, “Your results may vary.”