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.

[Guest_Dex4now_*]

2Bdecided: As I look back at my post, the bold emphasis did make it appear that I may have been offended. Sorry for that, I wasn't.

KikeG: Thanks for the other ABX link. I'll check it out. One of the aspects of audio that helps "muddy-the-waters" of balancing the objective and subjective parts of all this, at least for me , I can best illustrate by example. I can "tweak" my system to where I think it sounds best, and my wife thinks its too "bright". Obviously, measurement doesn't really play a part here, because were both listening to the same thing at the same time. Something different is happening between the ear and the brain. It is along these lines that I find it difficult sometimes to correlate a "specification" with what I hear, or quantify this to a "good" or "bad" sound.

Daneel: I originaly got that notion from an "engineering note" that I read back in the days when I was a tech at an audio store. I don't remember its source, but there's a very good chance that it was literature from one of the speaker cable manufacturers that we sold. In my defense, I did state in the next paragraph that it was "arguable" to the relevance of this.

You are, however, quite correct when you say I ". . . need some education."
Fortunately, this forum is supplying some.


One of the last points I want to make is: my view on the whole "audible effect of speaker wire" debate, comes fundamentally from listening to two "audiophile" speaker cables on a friends system about 20 years ago. This was in the analog days. I can't remember all the specifics of his system, (he owned the audio store, by the way), but I remember it was a Sumiko cartridge on a Rabco arm, can't remember the base, played through an Audio Research pre-amp, Classe' amp, and whatever the top of the line Magnapans were at that time. (They were four panels.) Anyway, there very definitely was a difference, albeit subtle, between the two cables. Neither of us had any bias towards either cable, we just wanted to see if there was a difference.

This is why I take the position I do when these speaker wire discussions come up. I can't necessarily state why one cable sounds better, or perhaps I should say, different, than another. I just know they do. But even that statement needs qualification. The difference, I believe, will only be realized in a very expensive system.

Dex