Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems 557 to bi-wire or not to bi-wire

Passive bi-amping does offer some slight benefits but definitely not as much as active.
I think it used to be the case that the 'champions' of analogue actives for hifi use, Naim & Linn, originally offered you the choice of single terminals on a passive crossover or multiple terminals for use with an external active. Their shared opinion was that if you wanted to waste your money on bi-amping, you might as well do it properly!

I bi-wire with short lengths of speaker cables connecting my B&W N802 each with a 557 in bridged mode connected to the 502 with balanced XLR cables. I'm happy with how this sounds, but some dealers have told me that bi-amping would be better but that would involve having long speaker cables or long interconnects unbalanced. When Meridian had a quality service department in Britain, I asked them which would be the best way to connect up my system and they said bridged mode, long XLR, short speaker cables, so I went with that. In fact, The Meridian service guy said that the 557 was designed primarily as a mono amp with the ability to run in stereo mode, rather than the other way round.

It's worth a shot to try bi-wiring if your dealer can loan you the cable. I'd also get in touch with your speaker manufacturer to see if they have an opinion. I contacted Revel (my speakers) with the same question and they said it makes no difference for my speakers. I'm sure Dali will give you an honest opinion!

Single run of higher quality cable will sound better for the money. Most of the benefits people hear, if any, from bi-wiring disappear when you use proper speaker cable 'jumper cables' from LF-HF on the speaker terminals when single wiring, as opposed to the nasty sounding 'metal links' usually supplied with the speakers. Connector quality will also make a surprisingly big difference IME.

I've gone DSP on my main system, so dispensed with all this, but consequently happen to have some sublime Kimber Select speaker cable, and reference jumpers, I'll be eBaying soon, as I can't justify keeping them for a second system. Not cheap, but they do sound gorgeous (well, to be more accurate, they don't really sound at all, which is kind of the point!).

Bi-amping is a different story, but to do it properly you generally need an active x-over or controller which has this capability. Knowing Meridian there will probably be something in the various ranges which might do this rather well, but others on here would doubtless know better which equipment this might be. But then again, you double your amp cost, add the cost of a x-over, and double your speaker cable cost again.

Makes those DSPs start to look like good value after all