School me on Jumper Cables

[Jeddie]

My PMC speakers have triple binding posts so it got me thinking.

 

Can I get some feedback on what Jumper cables are supposed to do? Advantage? Disadvantages? Or is there no difference?

 

How do jumper cable compare to bi-wiring?

 

Please note; I don't want to start a debate. Just peoples comments/experiences.

[Jeddie]

Anybody!!

[aechmea]

You will find that some people think that xxxxx is the bees knees and that it blows everything else into the weeds.

 

My experience is that it makes no difference at all.

 

It may depend upon what is inside the box on the other side of the jacks.

 

There are plenty of options if you want to try.

 

1.  Brass? connector plates.  Probably what the speakers came with.

2. Jumpers made from the same speaker cable that you use.

3.  Specialist jumper cable at a price!

3A.  speaker wire connected to top or bottom jacks or some permutation thereof.

4.  Bi-wire

5.  Passive bi-amp

6.  Active bi-amp.

 

6 is probably the only one that may lead to an improvement ie a special amp for the tweeter and another for the woofer.  But you need an external Xover box and multiple amps and cables, and you need to bypass the stuff inside the speaker which may or may not be possible without destructive surgery.

 

I have tried 1,3,4 and 6.

 

Save your money and buy better speakers.

[Neo]

Grab some speaker wire and have a play yourself. There are so many models of pmc speakers and amplifiers(which you haven’t said anything about), that it will be impossible to say with any certainty what would work in your case. 
Neo

Edited October 24, 2023 by Neo

[rantan]

I agree with @Neo and what he posted ................however my experience over many years with a wide variety of speakers is that replacing the supplied brass jumpers has always made an improvement no matter what speakers I had at the time.

It costs little -to-nothing to try for yourself because just four short pieces of any speaker cable you have laying around and not using can be used (bare wire is definitely better here and just cut into 5 cm lengths ).

My experience with passive bi-wiring is that it is not effective at all and even cheap jumpers are significantly better. Why? I have no idea, but this has been the case for me over many years.

So, just try the cheap cable jumpers in a length to suit your speaker terminals and see if sound quality is better.  I cannot guarantee anything but it will only cost you either zero or just a few $ to find out.

[TomW]

Good jumpers can and do make a big improvement to the sound.  Certainly the better ones are light-years ahead of the stock jumpers you get with speakers.  

[Jakeyb77_Redux]

I use these. 
The results would shock you 

 

[Jeddie]

I've got some left over speaker cables I could use as a jumper cable. This is what I have except for the red cable I have crossed out. 

 

Exactly how do  I connect jumper cables to binding posts?

 

[Kaynin]

Just don’t cross the streams

 

[audiofeline]

I've always thought that the speaker jumper should be made from a very short length of the wire as being used as the speaker cable. 

[rantan]

1 hour ago, audiofeline said:

I've always thought that the speaker jumper should be made from a very short length of the wire as being used as the speaker cable.

 

Definitely.

When I first replaced my brass jumper plates with some old speaker cable, it was a small but worthwhile improvement, but when I then had some jumpers made by Geoff Maloney in the Litz cable( same as my IC and speaker cable ), it was a significant leap in quality with notably more nuances and micro dynamics.

[joz]

2 hours ago, audiofeline said:

I've always thought that the speaker jumper should be made from a very short length of the wire as being used as the speaker cable. 

 

That would make too much sense!

Edited November 19, 2023 by joz