Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions Bi-Wiring M80's

need help guys.....I wanted to gain some sound quality so I tried bi-wiring my M80's tonight. I followed the proper guides, adding a speaker wire per side, and removing the post connecting straps, pretty basic stuff. The + and - wires were connected to the proper posts. When I started my system back up, the right front worked perfect, but on the left side, only the 2 woofers worked, none of the 4 other mids and tweets worked. I wired it back normal and still nothing, even hooked it up over on the left side with no luck. Anyone know what could have happened? Hope I didn't destroy a perfectly good speaker. Any help would be great. Thanks in advance.

Sounds to me like you need to start over, or you have another problem.
When hooked up correctly with good wires (see avatar) bi-wiring works fine.

First of all, I would not worry about "Buy" Wiring anyway, as you will not notice a difference, your just seperating the signal at the receiver versus at the speakers. Bi-Amping is a different animal if done correctly.

Please explain how you set everything up as it is unclear. Once you removed the bars on the speakers you ran two pairs of wires to each speaker? You want one pair hooked to the bottom terminals (woofers) and the other pair hooked to the top terminals (mids/highs). This needs to be done for both speakers.

Your saying you put the gold clips back in and tightened everything down tight, and put it back to having one pair of wires driving the speakers and they don't work anymore?

Again, Bi-Wiring will not accomplish anything, unless your incorporating a seperate amp for each section, disable the internal passive crossovers, and use an external crossover.

yes ,your description of 2-pair of wires per speaker is indeed what I did, 1-pair on bott. terminals and 1-pair on the top teminals, coinciding with the speaker conn. on the back of my Denon. Just the 1 left speaker, only the woofers work and none of the mids or tweets. The right front speaker is perfectly o.k.

Met, welcome. Bi-wiring(sometimes sarcastically termed "buy-wiring")isn't significantly different electrically and can't provide better sound quality. This has been discussed at length before, but briefly, the only difference is that instead of the wiring dividing just before it goes into the separate high and low sections of the speaker crossover inside the speaker(the wiring has to divide at latest by then)it instead divides as it leaves the amplifier terminals, but this has no sonic significance.

Now, although there's no benefit, there should also be no harm involved in the process. It appears that the mid/treble section of one M80 somehow became disconnected. If you're sure that the connecting strap was tight when you went back to the single wiring(re-check it)then the problem is internal, likely just a loose wire(but why?; just a coincidence?).If you want to open it up, you could examine the wiring. But no, if you're concerned that this somehow burned out the drivers or the mid/treble section of the crossover, there's no reason for that to have happened.

Move your left speaker to the right and see if it works. Provided you connected everything up properly, if it works, you damaged your amp. If it doesn't work, you damaged your speaker.

I already removed the "terminal Block" from the back of the speaker, nothing looks loose or abnormal. Should I remove each of the drivers to inspect their wiring now?? Seems like too much of a coincidence to me, and yet on the other hand I can't see any other significant damage by such a simple procedure.....

If none of the mids or tweeters work, then any loose wiring would almost certainly have to be ahead of them, since four separate drivers couldn't possibly all become loosened. So, no, it wouldn't seem to be useful to examine each driver.

Connecting the left speaker to the right channel shouldn't indicate anything, since if the left woofers are working that means that the left channel of the receiver is still operating.