Otto is once again in the hot seat! Join us for this week's episode, where he tackles tough questions concerning amplifiers and bi-wiring.
Don't forget to send in your own questions – which could be featured in a future episode – via the "Send us your questions" form at the bottom of this page.
We design speakers to work with a variety of amplifiers, taking care of things like impedance curves for example, because we don't know what amplifier you're going to be using your system.
We don't have a specific recommendation for what amplifier to use, because there are many unknowns, for example your room, your music tastes or your system. On top of that, we haven't tested all the amplifiers available, so we don't know which one could be the perfect solution for your specific scenario.
What we always recommend doing is to contact your dealer. They usually have a lot of experience with different speaker and amp pairings and will be able to help you in determining the optimum setup for your specific situation.
In all of our testing and everything else that we have worked with over the many years, we simply haven't seen or heard any evidence of an improvement, simply from using bi-wiring.
So, even though bi-writing might give you some more options and some more things to tinker with, we don't think it actually results in a better performance.
Bi-wiring can instead increase the probability of doing things wrong more than anything. So we don't see the benefit, but rather the risk of messing things up instead.
To elaborate on that point, if you wanted to use one cable for the tweeter and one cable for the woofer, you would essentially be attempting to balance the different properties of the two speaker drivers with two cables, i.e balancing the properties of the speaker cable going to the woofer with the one going to the tweeter. But in trying to achieve that balance you risk affecting the sound of the speaker, and affecting the original tuning of the loudspeaker, as designed by us, the manufacturer.
So, in conclusion, for us at least, bi-wiring doesn't make a great deal of sense.