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Should You Bi-Wire Your Speakers?

So you’ve got your new shiny set of speakers, (hooray!) and now you’re ready to connect them to your amplifier. A question on some Hi-Fi owners’ lips is to bi-wire or not to bi-wire?

Hang on a second, what is bi-wiring?!

Bi-wiring is a way of connecting your speakers to your amp using two pairs of connecting wires rather than one. Some speakers come with two pairs of binding posts; one pair for the high frequencies and the other pair for the low frequencies. In a usual set up, one pair of wires carries the full range musical signal from the amplifier to each of the loudspeakers as shown in the below diagram. 

Should You Bi-Wire Your Speakers?

However with bi-wiring you will be running two sets of loudspeaker cables from your amplifier to each of your speakers. One pair which carries the high frequencies (tweeters) and the other will carry low frequencies (woofer) from the amp.  By having this set up, you are forcing the tweeter currents and the woofer currents to run in separate cables.

Should You Bi-Wire Your Speakers?

At Cambridge Audio all of our modern speakers do not have the capacity to be bi-wired. We always want to offer our customers the best possible components in our products, rather than adding an extra set of terminals to the speakers we would rather invest in a better crossover. This philosophy also extends to our views on wiring. Rather than spending your hard earned cash on two sets of mediocre wires that can be bi-wired into a speaker, why not single wire using some really great speaker cable? This is also more space effective as you don’t get the tangling mess of cables at the back of your hi-fi set up which can often come with bi-wiring.  

There is a lot of discussion around this topic; in fact you’ll find yourself a little lost in a sea of online forums about it! Some believe that bi-wiring is purely a marketing ploy, often referred to as ‘buy wiring’, whilst others believe it makes a noticeable impact particularly to middle range sound. We made the decision not to build our speakers with a bi-wiring option so we can focus on making the components inside of our products the best they can be.