Hi all,

De-lurking for the first time, always enjoy reading the practical no b.s advice in this forum

I have the opportunity to pick up a nice pair of bookshelves which are bi-wireable but I don't intend to bi-wire them. Unfortunately the bridging plates for the speaker terminals are missing.

Would using 4 small pieces of speaker cable wire be fine to act as makeshift bridging plates? I'm concerned over a few things:
i. Would this approach short circuit the speakers or cause any potential fire safety issues?
ii. Would there be any degradation of sound? I'm thinking it doesn't but I'm not very well versed in electronics I just enjoy listening to music

Thanks for the help in advance!

In many cases the bridging plates are of low quality and it's actually recommended to replace them with some high quality cables.

So your approach is the good one and is completely safe unless you short circuit the cables in which case you are most likely to trigger your amp security (ie. it will shutdown) than risk any fire incident.

Hi Benool,

Thanks for the advice! I thought any potential short around the speaker binding posts would damage the internal crossovers since there are a bunch of electronics there. Never thought about shorting the amp as well

: x Guess that's why I was not particularly good at learning about electric circuits!

I've just gone from a massive bi-wired cable down to a single-wired + home-made bridge solution. I have not perceived any difference in sound-quality, and the thinner wires are a lot easier to hide from view.

It's okay to replace the bridging plates with cable. A lot of people does that since plates can really be low quality, and you really need only a few inches of cable to replace them.

Two people now have mentioned "low quality" bridging plates and the advantages of replacing them.

How low quality must such short pieces of conductor be before there is a perceptible difference? Or am I missing something?

I'm with you all the way Soap. Considering the length is so short, these bridges must be pretty shitty. More than likely we have some people who have lost their way to the audiophile forums.

While you guys are at it..I have a pretty newbie question, could someone explain to me why crossover circuits in passive speakers are always so 'exposed' in the cabinet? Shouldn't they be cased in a insulated box?

I was just wondering, since its an exposed circuit board, if it sparks wouldn't that mean bye bye pricey made of mdf/wood speaker?

I must admit I have never heard of a speaker catching fire because of the crossover. I have known of speaker voice coils being damaged by overheating, but even then there were no flames involved.

Some of the speakers have insulated crossover. While I've never heard a difference in sound, some claim there is. But I don't really think there's a possibility that crossover would went on fire.

Crossovers (except maybe in extremely high powered speakers, but these normally have line-level crossovers) are pretty unlikely to spark substantially. A well designed crossover should have resistors, caps and inductors which don't heat up much during normal usage. I have, however, seen a speaker fire caused by a crossover. A small (20W or so) rated speaker was driven way too hard, and a hot resistor in the crossover caused the wool speaker filling to catch alight. Not pretty - but not nearly as common as fires caused by overheating drivers.

Insulating for electrical reasons isn't needed, as the signals are high level and fairly immune to picking up noise.

Crossovers are probably exposed to allow them to cool, to save on the extra cabinet size that a sealed box inside the cabinet would require, and to save costs. If the crossovers are well designed, this isn't a problem.