Help! Amp to Speaker cabling

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Newbie question - sorry!!! Just taken delivery of Marantz CD6003 and PM6003 with Mordant Short Mezzo 2 speakers. Included with the speakers were two lengths of speaker cable - I was only expecting one.

The first cable is white-ish - I think it reads QED Silver Anniversary XT along its length, it has two wires running through it, one appear white-ish, the other red-ish in colour. I presume that this is for non-biwring? So I can just trim the ends to connect from the amp to the speakers (which have metal bridges on their terminals, i.e. again for non-biwired systems I think?). Do the colours correspond to pos / neg or doesn't it matter as long as I get the connections consistent?

The other cable appears to have four wires running through it in parallel, appear copper coloured inside, the shielding is clear giving the overall appearance of an orange / copper coloured cable. Don't really know what this is but presume it is for bi-wiring which I don't intend to use (and I'm not sure the Marantz amp supports that anyway).

Am I right in the above thinking - i.e. use the QED 2-wire cable? Obviously I could ask the suppliers tomorrow but I was hoping to start setting it up this evening if anyone can help out in the meantime? Thanks, in anticipation. Gary

 

[Anonymous]

If I understand your note, you appear correct. [I have some Silver Anniversary in my a/v system and it's not got different colours, but maybe the newer stuff has ..... ?]

If the speakers have 4 inputs on each, then they can be bi-wired - so you would have the cables connected to the 2 speaker outputs of the amp and going in to 4 on the speaker, making sure you remove the bridging parts joining the speaker cable inputs red-red and black-black ......

Depending on the speaker cable quality and the kit in question, bi-wiring may or may not give an improvement...... it often can do, but some prefer to use a single wire option with better quality cable...... not sure what that bi-wire cable is, that you have!?

 

[Anonymous]

The brass cross-links on the speaker's terminals will certainly not be the best "crossover" (note the inverted commas guys) and the Mezzos were almost certainly intended to be bi-wired. From looking at your amp's manual on line, you should be able to strip back the four cores of the four-core cables and jam a pair into each + and - terminal (they're screw-down and/or banana plug compatible) then run bi-wire to the four terminals on the backs of the speakers. Be sure to remove the external links as suggested previously and also be sure to maintain both correct polarity and matching of HF and LF cores (not so important, perhaps, if you're coming off one set of terminals). You could try wiring to bot the A and B speaker output terminals on the amp and switching both A and B outputs on. It will be a matter of experimentation as to which setup works best.

Alternatively #1 junk the freebie cables entirely and buy some modest but 5-star rated cables (Chord Anniversary Silver Screen spring to mind) and bi-wire properly.

Alternatively #2 junk the brass jumpers on the back of the speakers and make up some jumpers out of the single-wire speaker cable. Again, some experimentation may be necessary.

 

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the quick replies! I'll have a play about and see which works best - might start off non-biwired using the QED Silver XT first and see how this works. By the way - I trimmed the ends of this back and when you take the outer (plastic?) off there are definitely two differently coloured inner cores - one white, one read. I presume that these act as a 'packing' or similar to the silver wires which appear to surround them (and which I assume are the conductive elements.

Thanks once again. Gary