bi wire or naca 5 cable

Don’t biwire. Get A5 if you prefer the sound. Get two sets of plugs at the speaker end, in an F connection, so you get get rid of the speakers’ existing biwire links. 

HH has it absolutely right.

All I can add is a clarification...  Do the F connection with whatever you have; even if you stick with your existing speaker wire.

It's well worth reading these threads in the forum FAQ:

Naim Speaker Cable

Soldering NACA5 and the F connection

Thank you HH , Huge and Richard. Can you please share why bi wired is not preferred?

hifinewbie posted:

Thank you HH , Huge and Richard. Can you please share why bi wired is not preferred?

Quick version - it'll sound better with single runs.

Slightly longer version - Naim amps are designed in such a way that the electrical characteristics of the speaker cable are quite important  - more so than is sometimes the case with other designs/manufacturers.

While newer models are generally thought to be somewhat less critical, NAC A5 isn't just what Naim recommend, it is to some extent what the amps actually need for stability.  Bi-wiring is likely to bugger up (a technical term!) the required electrical characteristics - possibly not to a dangerous extent, but at least to the extent that the sound quality will be suboptimal.

There are other cables which can be used without issue, and there are also other other cables which Naim say could actually damage your amp (e.g. 'litz' type cables).  It depends on how far they are from the required specs, i.e. capacitance and inductance vs length.

There's been lots (and lots) of discussion of such things on the forum  - click here for just one fairly recent example - but the bottom line is you'll almost certainly get the best sound by following the advice (in this case, single runs of NAC A5 with an 'F' connection at the speaker end).

thanks Dave shedding some light on this,  i may have to do some experimentation....

here is the cut - paste from Silver 300 manual on bi-wiring

=================================

The Effects of Bi-Wiring and Bi-Amping

The forum must have hundreds of threads on this topic. I doubt there is anything new to be said. Search function is your friend here. 

My question to the OP:

the Uniti 2 has one set of speaker outlets, so how would you propose to bi-wire it in the first place?

The blurb from Monitor Audio seems like rubbish to me. It says that the different drive units will get different signals because the signal  would have been divided. Which of course they won’t - they are both receiving a full range signal. Unless I’ve misread it of course. 

Taking Joe’s picture, the only way to achieve biwiring is to solder two sets of cables onto the sockets at the amplifier end. This is where the problems start, as the amplifier sees two cables, which halves the resistance or doubles the capacitance or something - whatever it does, Naim amps don’t like it. 

What you can do is to add a second power amp, and drive the speakers with two amps each driving one set of wires. 

It’s far easier to just use an F connection, which has been tested time and time again, and we know it works. Biwire terminals on speakers are largely a fashion thing that make speakers look complicated and therefore good. All that happens in reality is that the majority of buyers stick with the manufacturer’s metal links, whose only contribution is to make the sound worse. 

"This means that if separate speaker cables are connected to the low and high frequency terminals, not only have the drive units had the frequency's directed and divided for them, but the two separate speaker cables will now also carry different signals, the bass cable mostly the lows, and the tweeter cable mostly the highs.
Once the high and low frequencies have been separated in this fashion, the strong current pulses and surges demanded by bass drivers when reproducing bass or drums, will not interact with the delicate sounds of a flute or cymbal."
Since with bi-wiring both cables are connected to the same terminals on the amplifier, this is patently not the case as the same signal voltage is applied to each cable.

"In a single wired system, unwanted mechanical and electrical resonances manifest as distortion at both sets of speaker terminals. Due to the impedance of the speaker cables, these distortions will not be entirely cancelled by the amplifier. Instead, they modulate between the two crossovers, and degrade sound quality."
This proposes that the minute current generated by mechanical movement in the speaker cable (i.e. the cable acting as a microphone) have an effect on the speaker or the amplifier output.  Well try it: connect a mic to a set of speakers and flick the mic with a finger - see how much sound comes out of the speaker!  Furthermore since the two halves of the crossover are supposed to separate the high and low signals, if "Instead, they modulate between the two crossovers, and degrade sound quality" then there's something seriously wrong with the crossover design (actually it would mean that the crossover inductors are mounted far too close to each other - a serious design flaw).

That article is just marketing speak, nothing more!

For a given outlay, you'll generally get a better result from buying better cable than buying twice the amount of a less good cable.

(Bi-amping using active crossovers is a completely different matter, and for a completely different reason, nothing to do with the pseudo-science in that marketing blurb.)

Huge posted:

That article is just marketing speak, nothing more!

Exactly,  a lot to say about nothing.

Naim amps need a high'ish inductance load - bi wiring halves inductance.  So if you want your amp to sound sub optimum then bi wire it.    ........    Nothing much more to say other than both HH & Joe make some points to ponder.

BIG thank you for the explanation HH,Joe,Huge & Mike, i can safely ignore the bi-wiring now. 

There are of course plenty of cables available that are terminated into 4 from 2.  

Could be that Monitor Audio speakers are different than e.g. Naim speakers, where the crossover is one entity.

It's not clear from the manual but I could imagine that the Monitor Audio speakers have a low pass filter between bass terminals and the mid/bass and a high pass filter between tweeter terminals and the tweeter. If the bass and tweeter terminals are connected with the terminal links, they make a complete crossover in parallel configuration.

Then the Monitor Audio manual would make sense and driving each chassis with its own speaker cable and amp (bi-wiring and bi-amping) and the terminal links removed, might indeed improve the sound quality. The signal would still pass through the passive low resp. high pass filter but at least the EMF from the bass driver can't influence the tweeter.

hifinewbie posted:

BIG thank you for the explanation HH,Joe,Huge & Mike, i can safely ignore the bi-wiring now. 

Do get F connectors or jumpers though - you’ll get better sound for very little cash. 

Like wot HH sez.

jfritzen posted:

Could be that Monitor Audio speakers are different than e.g. Naim speakers, where the crossover is one entity.

It's not clear from the manual but I could imagine that the Monitor Audio speakers have a low pass filter between bass terminals and the mid/bass and a high pass filter between tweeter terminals and the tweeter. If the bass and tweeter terminals are connected with the terminal links, they make a complete crossover in parallel configuration.

Then the Monitor Audio manual would make sense and driving each chassis with its own speaker cable and amp (bi-wiring and bi-amping) and the terminal links removed, might indeed improve the sound quality. The signal would still pass through the passive low resp. high pass filter but at least the EMF from the bass driver can't influence the tweeter.

 

"(Bi-amping using active crossovers is a completely different matter, and for a completely different reason, nothing to do with the pseudo-science in that marketing blurb.)"

Huge posted:

jfritzen posted:

Could be that Monitor Audio speakers are different than e.g. Naim speakers, where the crossover is one entity.

It's not clear from the manual but I could imagine that the Monitor Audio speakers have a low pass filter between bass terminals and the mid/bass and a high pass filter between tweeter terminals and the tweeter. If the bass and tweeter terminals are connected with the terminal links, they make a complete crossover in parallel configuration.

Then the Monitor Audio manual would make sense and driving each chassis with its own speaker cable and amp (bi-wiring and bi-amping) and the terminal links removed, might indeed improve the sound quality. The signal would still pass through the passive low resp. high pass filter but at least the EMF from the bass driver can't influence the tweeter.

 

"(Bi-amping using active crossovers is a completely different matter, and for a completely different reason, nothing to do with the pseudo-science in that marketing blurb.)"

As far as I understand the manual, they talk about bi-amping using passive crossovers: amp->cable->terminals->high resp. low pass filter->driver. It's imaginable, isn't it?

jfritzen posted:

Huge posted:

"(Bi-amping using active crossovers is a completely different matter, and for a completely different reason, nothing to do with the pseudo-science in that marketing blurb.)"

As far as I understand the manual, they talk about bi-amping using passive crossovers: amp->terminals->high resp. low pass filter->driver. It's imaginable, isn't it?

Absolutely imaginable, but a halfway house - at most 50% of the gain for, at a minimum, 70% of the cost.

The only significant gain is removing the interaction of the impedance of the HF and LF drivers and even then it only has any effect right around the crossover point.  Much better to replicate the crossover filters using small signal filters before the power amps.

No doubt an active crossover is much better. I just want to say that Monitor Audio might construct their speakers this way and why they might see a benefit in bi-wiring/-amping.

In addition to Naim’s advice to avoid biwiring, you might want to consider what Chord have to say on the matter if you’re using their cables:

”As a general rule (and there will always be exceptions) we find that bi-wiring will open out the sound stage and increase perceived levels of detail. However, single wiring will often sound the most musically coherent. During our research, nearly all single wire speaker cable out-performs the bi-wire equivalent. This makes a lot of sense; the single wire speaker cable has two high quality conductors and the bi-wire cable requires four. So for a given budget, we believe that a single wire cable will always out-perform the equivalent bi-wire cable, so much so that we no longer produce dedicated bi-wire cables”

If you still want to try it, I would suggest that you find a retailer who will allow you to try a biwire set and some NACA5 to see which you prefer. 

FWIW I tried some Linn biwire cable many years ago with a Naim amp and The only difference I could detect was that the power amp seemed to run a little hotter, so I didn’t bother. 

Biwire is the devils work,  giving us too many opportunities to corrupt both the intended performance of amplifiers and speakers.

I have some sympathy with the OP - the manual for my B&W speakers actively recommends biwiring, whereas the manual for my NAP200 says... well, you know.

For a casting vote/opinion, I spoke to a dealer who is a fairly major dealer for both Naim and B&W. Their suggestion was that there would be benefits either way (biwiring favouring the speakers, single runs favouring the amp) and only my ears could decide which set of benefits outweighed the other.

In the end, I’ve gone with single runs of NACA5 with jumper cables made from the same. No complaints, no regrets.

Mark

I never understood the concept of bi-wiring - it has never made sense to me.

Whilst I can see that passive bi-amping may improve sound slightly, the significant cost of an extra amp (or two with a three way speaker) would seem unjustified for the likely marginal improvement given the relatively small extra cost for an active crossover enabling removal of the passive crossover and thus the benefits of a full active bi- or tri- amped system.

In the case of Naim amps bi-wiring doesn't make sense for passive speakers. Other manufacturers have dual speaker outlets which makes bi-wiring passive speakers simple if you're willing to spend for the extra set of cables (with no guarantee it's going to sound any better). Otherwise, as you say, you get into bi-amping or active speakers - a whole different ball game than the OP's intent.