I’m a bass player and a lot of people think that.
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Thats funny, I think. My experience and recommendation is that consider the dual terminals a blessing and indication of what you should do. Separate pairs with no jumper will lead to the best results. Yes, better jumpers are better but not as good as no jumper (why choke the chain?).
The Aspens have shined brightest when you use your highest quality cable for the mid/top connection and a “lesser” one from the same company on the bass. Did this with Iconoclast and Stealth. Each of these companies also verified the method and cable used. In each case, the bass cable was two and a half times less expensive than the mid/top one.
So, a suggestion would be to invest in the best full range with a single pair. Enjoy it, get used to it. When there is a little more in the kitty, buy the cheaper bass cable. You will be paying a little more than a bi-wire or equal quality jumper setup. Why not be double blessed?
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I see you have a stereo amp. A good bi-wire might work just as well. I would consult the cable manufacturer.
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Is this second post also replying to me? I’m using BHK 600s for the M/T, 250 for the bass. Just checked Iconoclast website and 18 ft of Series I is $1510 and 8 ft of Series II is $3020 (what I have) so your price difference seems about right. I may have to go with the Series I on the bass; I’ll live with the BAV coming this week for now.
I don’t want to disrupt this thread any more than I have, but if you could give a brief timeline for FR30 breakin I would appreciate it.
I was curious to hear if there is a SQ difference when feeding main speaker cables to mid/hi and jumping to bass vs the other way.
I compared the two configurations and for me, the clear winner for better bass and clearer highs was to feed the bass and jump to mid/hi. Go figure!?
I have FR10’s, BHK Pre, M1200’s and Furutech DSS 4.1 speaker cables and Furutech FS Alpha 36 jumpers.
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Thanks for doing the test. Maybe something to do with the crossover design??
Apologies for the error. I got tied up in the thread, I guess. I used SI and SII Iconoclast to good advantage on the FR’30 as I went from a single to a double pair. Even much better results doing the same with Stealth Dream V18 and Dream Petite.
I do not remember how long it took to break in the FR30’s. I only remember how long (very long) it takes to do large surface drivers like Magnaplanars.
Happy cake day @dchang05
No recommendation on speaker cables only to buy the very best you can afford.
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Interesting as this is always the way I have connected my speakers without even thinking about it. Glad you experimented with that and verified my results.
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Glad you figured out this is the wrong way to connect a speaker, despite what your designer says. The woofer is where all the current goes and where you want the first hookup to be: jumper to the mids and tweeter.
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I agree (and I own half a dozen basses). That is why the Decware ZROCK3 is such a precious device in my system.
Thanks Paul for your input! I could not try this experience on FR30 as of which way sounds better in my system, now I use a pair of bi-wired speaker cable so I don’t need to worry about it anymore. 
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Thanks for the cable info. I think I’ll go with the SI for bass to augment the SII on top. (I was wrong about the price, it’s $2190 for 18ft of SI.)
As for breakin they are only at about 25 hours, so likely a ways to go. The most recent speakers I bought new were Infinity Betas in 1988. After that used VMPS V60s. Both of these are a little tipped up from neutral and I am finding the FR30s slightly muffled on top. I wonder if I have a disease.
Thanks again for the cable advice.
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Thank you and a great recommend!
Magister, we can indeed arrange for a in-home audition of what many consider the best value in audio cables. Our speaker cables are incredible. You might visit our website and read some of the “un-solicited, paid for” reviews. We have a number of FR owners at all levels that enjoy our cables to experience what their fine speakers are capable of delivering. Happy to help.
Bob
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Like @tomhail , I connect my main speaker cables to the woofer input on my FR10 and then use jumpers to feed the mid/high inputs. I know that “real” audiophiles never look at owners manuals, but page 8 of the FR10 manual says to hook the amplifier to the “left set of terminals” (which is the “Woofer Input”) when using jumper cables.
If not using jumpers, there continues to be controversy about whether it is better to use single cables with internal bi-wiring for each channel, different cables for the woofer inputs vs. the mid/high inputs, or two pairs of identical cables in a “shotgun” arrangement. Some manufacturers (eg, Vandersteen) and consumers say that identical cable pairs sound best, while others say that there isn’t much noticeable difference among these three options.
When I spoke to Cardas about how they do internal bi-wiring, they mentioned that they typically arrange more wires to send to the woofer input because of the greater current demands of typical woofers. Not all of the Cardas speaker cables are designed to be bi-wired, and that decision is based primarily on cable geometry and wire gauge.
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Depends on your priorites, which is why I recommended the Audience Front Row. A used pair could well be in your reach as some upgrade to Front Row Reserve. As the saying goes different strokes for different folks, BTW, the recommended Kimber cables, while value priced outperform some suggested to you. The only way to know is to hear the cables in your system with your ears and your music.
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Very interesting and matches what Paul said in his post above.
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A true bi-wired speaker cable is not just splitting the conductors. For example, here is how SRA Takshaka do their biwire SC from their website:
“If a speaker manufacturer goes through the trouble of designing a speaker to be bi-wireable, it’s because they want you to bi-wire it — period. Why? Because the upper and lower portions of the speaker have fundamentally different needs. Your tweeters thrive on speed and detail; your woofers demand power and control. Feeding both with the exact same wire recipe is a missed opportunity. It’s like putting the same tires on a race car and an off-roader — functional, but far from optimized.
When designing the Takshaka bi-wire speaker cables, we didn’t just split the same conductor into two. Instead, we engineered each leg independently. Leveraging years of speaker design experience, we crafted two distinct hybrid wire combinations: both using pure silver, 24k gold, and high-density OFHC copper — but in different proportions and gauges, each tuned specifically to the driver it feeds.
The top pair — feeding the tweeters — includes a touch more gold, helping to deliver warmth, fullness, and a rich musicality that brings vocals and upper harmonics to life without harshness or glare. Meanwhile, the bottom pair — feeding the woofers — leans slightly more into silver, offering improved speed, slam, and articulation that gives bass notes definition and authority, without bloat or smear.
This isn’t just a tweak — it’s an evolution. Each three-meter pair of Takshaka bi-wire speaker cables contains over 1,500 feet — or five football fields! — of hand-twisted precious metal wiring. That’s a massive investment in signal integrity and tonal accuracy — but your speakers are worth it. After all, why build a world-class cable and send a one-size-fits-all.”
But cable companies design their bi-wire differently. for example, Audience FRR bi-wire speaker cables are priced almost double of their regular SC, so they are using double of the conductors probably.
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I’m glad that Donald quoted the design strategy used by Snake River Audio for its bi-wire cables. Clearly, different makers of audio cables may design their bi-wires differently – and those designs may interact differently with the crossovers employed by different speaker designers. (I hope that @Chris_Brunhaver can provide a bit of input on which types of bi-wire cables are likely to be the best match for the crossovers in the Aspen speaker designs.) Below, I’ve quoted some info from the Vandersteen Audio website regarding their recommendations for bi-wiring. (I’m sure that some of the folks on this thread have seen these recommendations before, but some have not.)
"Bi-wiring uses two separate sets of speaker cables to connect a single pair of loudspeakers to an amplifier. Coupled with a crossover designed specifically for bi-wiring, it offers many of the advantages of bi-amplifying the speakers with two separate amplifiers without the cost and complexity of two amplifiers.
With two amplifiers, bi-amplification used two sets of speaker cables so we experimented with doubling-up the speaker wires and with larger wire. Neither duplicated the bi-amplification improvements. Then we considered that in a bi-amplified system, one set of wires carries the low-frequencies and the other set of wires carries the high-frequencies. We modified a speaker’s crossovers to accept two sets of cables and present different load characteristics to each set so that the low-frequencies would be carried by one set of wires and the high-frequencies by the other set of wires. Finally we heard the sonic improvements of bi-amplification with a single amplifier.
Additional experiments with a Hall Effect probe revealed that high-current bass frequencies created a measurable field around the wires that expanded and collapsed with the signal. We believe that this dynamic field modulates the smaller signals, especially the very low level treble frequencies. With the high-current signal (Bass) separated from the low-current signal (Treble) this small signal modulation was eliminated as long as the cables were separated by at least an inch or two.
The crossovers in Vandersteen bi-wirable speakers are engineered with completely separate high-pass and low-pass sections. The bass inputs pass low-frequencies to the woofers, but become more and more resistive at higher frequencies. The treble inputs pass high-frequencies to the midrange and tweeter, but become more and more resistive at low-frequencies. The output from the amplifier always takes the path of least resistance so deep bass frequencies go to the bass input (Low impedance at low-frequencies) rather than to the treble inputs (High impedance at low frequencies). For the same reason, treble frequencies go to the treble input (Low impedance at high-frequencies) rather than to the bass inputs (High impedance at high-frequencies). At the actual crossover frequency, the output from the amplifier would be divided equally between the two inputs as they would both have the same impedance at that frequency. Because of the different reflected impedances of the cables, the crossover between the woofer and midrange actually occurs at the wire ends where they connect to the amplifier.
The benefits of bi-wiring are most obvious in the midrange and treble. The low-current signal to the midrange and tweeter drivers does not have to travel on the same wire as the high-current woofer signal. The field fluctuations and signal regeneration of the high-current low-frequencies are prevented from distorting or masking the low-current high-frequencies. The back EMF (Electro-Mechanical Force) from the large woofer cannot affect the small-signal upper frequencies since they do not share the same wires.
The effects of bi-wiring are not subtle. The improvements are large enough that a bi-wire set of moderately priced cable will usually sound better than a single run of more expensive cable.
All the cables in a bi-wire set must be the same. There is often great temptation to use a wire known for good bass response on the woofer inputs and a different wire known for good treble response on the midrange/tweeter inputs. This will cause the different sonic characteristics of the two wires in the middle frequencies to interfere with the proper blending of the woofer and midrange driver through the crossover point. The consistency of the sound will be severely affected as the different sounding woofer and midrange drivers conflict with each other in the frequency range where our ears are most sensitive to sonic anomalies. The disappointing result is a vague image, a lack of transparency through the midrange and lower treble and a loss of detail and clarity.
Some of the benefits of bi-wiring are from the physical separation of the high-current bass and low-current midrange/tweeter wires. So-called bi-wire cables that combine the wires in one sheath do not offer the full advantages of true bi-wiring although they may be an excellent choice for mono-wiring the speakers."
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Well, do whatever you think sounds best but the think behind that is that changes the changes response of a woofer by raising it’s Q because of the ohms law interaction with the impedance peak but with our mid/tweeter response.
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