Should I twist together the pair of wire pairs for bi-amped speakers?

My question is regarding speaker wire setup for my bi-amped situation.

I have Belden 5000 12 gauge speaker wire, it comes in it’s own sheath with a clockwise twist on the pair.

My question is… should I keep the two pairs for a speaker running separately or can/should I twist the two together with a counter-clockwise twist?

I would keep them separate. I doubt we would be able to improve noise rejection by twisting on our own.

I agree with Elk. If it was me, I would keep them a few inches apart, from the amp to the speaker.
If you don’t have them off the floor, there are numerous ways to do it. Years ago I bought a bag of electric fence insulators, some square wood fence post caps, and glued the insulators to them. I used singles for my speaker cables and two on each platform for ICs. Very inexpensive, easy to make, and keeps all of my cables to and from the amp, neatly in place. I think it was Home Depot or Lowes that I bought them.

I believe Vandersteen, who recommend bi-wiring their speakers, suggest keeping them two or more inches apart. I believe bi-amping would be the same.

Thank you for your responses. My story… for kicks, The day before I posted this question I watched Paul’s video on should we keep wires apart… in it he sidetracked to say that we should keep them off the ground… because the ground is, well, ground… This made excellent sense to me, way way more than people saying they do it because of vibration… So I went to my shop and grabbed a load of wood bits, raised the wires and sat down for a listen, but before I even reached the chair my brain was saying, ‘no way…’ . The difference was kinda epic (my floor/building is concrete). The excess bass went away, the highs gained air… etc etc…
It was such a huge change I had to take down loads of acoustic treatments and kinda re-evaluate for this new sound.
So I woke up early and went to the shop and made littel stands, I cut out notches in 1x3 pine scraps and put them on bases… they look like little Cacti… at the same time I thought I would be clever and twist up the pairs of pairs… installed it all and sat for a listen… it was, er, different, I got it to sound OK, but it seemed to be back where I started before raising the wire off the floor. So after posting this question and before any responses… I concluded the twisting the pairs of pairs was choking the signal and took them out and untwisted them and put them back in… big change… excess bass returned to tight bass inn ballance, highs returned etc… So I spent a few hours trying different acoustical solutions and got that going on again.
So, moral of my story is… keep the speaker wires off the ground, and don’t twist 'em up. Kinda thinking I might want to un-sheath the wires and un-twist them from their factory state.
Thanks for your input.
Cheers!

Don’t un-sheath them, the manufacturer designed them that way for a reason.
From what you described they are now performing very well. And if they sound bad, it may be difficult to get them back together.
Time to enjoy the music.

Inductance is DISTANCE determined for EACH pair. To lower the impedance, or resistance, to current flow, you want low inductance. This means a tight center to center between the two wires. The twist holds them together, no noise rejection in an unbalanced pair to speak of. The twist is to reduce the loop area in THAT pair to a minimum (why distance between wires matters).

The current LOOP OF A PAIR needs to have a minimum of distance, the dielectric doesn’t matter for inductance, between wires. PAIRS that are not in that loop are not important to that circuit.

That’s your answer that really matters.

Galen Gareis

Dont untwist the pairs! The factory is right. Low impedance for current is low inductance, and that needs a tight as you can get wire center to center in the pair. No opinion here, it is physics. Speaker cables are high current low impedance circuits. Keep each PAIR twisted, no need to twist sets of pairs, however.

Galen

Pro cables are often quoted in terms of resistance per km. My recently installed speakers require inductance lower than 1 microH. My expensive cables fail that test. Cheap solid braided and multi-strand cables pass that test, such as these DIY. http://diyaudioprojects.com/Power/Low-Inductance-DIY-Speaker-Cables/
There are plenty cheap ones that pass, I chose Atlas Hyper 2.0 with factory terminations.
For valve amps I was told by a leading designer to use solid copper unterminated.
Whatever the requirements of your amplifier and speakers, I would choose a cable based on its electrical properties and certainly not take it apart.
Nordost are probably favoured because of their incredibly low inductance, about 0.15 microH.

My Belden Iconoclast TPC (should be called Galen instead of Belden) measure 0.081 and 0.083uH/ft. I really like them.

Belden were on my list. The Atlas cables were made up 10 minutes from home and I picked them up the same day. Also Blue Jeans, but they are all shipped from the USA.

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