Biwiring and Cables, A couple of questions on how to Options

[atici]

I want to buy decent cables for my speakers and was wondering on how the setup should be.

The speakers in question (Infinity Alpha 40) is biwirable. My amp has two pairs of speaker outputs. In this case which one is a better idea: to use biwiring cables or use separate wires using both of the speaker outputs on my amp? If I use separate identical cables, does the length make difference?

And about the cable diameter, are the thick ones necessarily better? If so how much? I am planning to spend around $80 for my cabling. 7 feet cable for each channel is sufficient. Do you have any suggestions on quality but cheap cables? What do you think about the ones here?

Please let me know what you think. Your help is much appreciated.

[2Bdecided]

Sorry Dex - I didn't mean to offend, and I know you're not trying to sell us Hi-Fi equipment!


I probably disagree on "subjectively better". Or maybe I don't... If you mean "sounds nice to me" then I don't care what sounds nicer to you - I want something that sounds like the original event. If we accept that this can't happen, then I guess we all buy whatever sounds like the lesser evil to each one of us, which gets us back to "sounds nice to me".


I can only bring my experience at university forward in this, because I've never played with "serious" Hi-Fi (of the cost you mention) at home.

1. On a system which was designed so that the measured frequency response was flatter than anything you have ever heard in your life, the results were jaw dropping. We had Ken Kesler in (Hi-fi Journo), and we couldn't shift him - he played CD after CD after CD, and loved it. He wrote it up as the best system he'd heard...
http://www.essex.ac.uk/ese/research/audio_...press.html#HiFi

2. On that same system, it would have good days and bad days. Maybe there was a software fault which meant at was actually different on different days - but this is unlikely. It was subjective, but it wasn't subtle - we'd walk in and agree that it sounded like a dog, using the same recording that had sounded great the previous day, and would probably sound great the next day. It did sound better after it had been left on for hours (even days). It (sometimes) sounded much better at night. What was it? Variable RF interference from several thousand PCs on campus? Temperature changes? Us in different moods (but why all of us?!) We never found out.


The interesting thing is that the response was only "perfectly" flat at one point in space. At other points, it was still better than most systems, but at that one point, it was "nearly perfect". What was amazing is that most people could find that tiny sweet spot. Not just audiophiles, but people who thought their ghetto blaster was good! Whether they liked it was a different matter - some people wanted more bass, and some recordings always sounded too bright. But don't you find it strange that in a world where we go after "what sounds nice to me", objective measured perfection, when nearly achieved, was usually preferable? And even preferable to "very nearly as good but not quite"?

Cheers,
David.