Almost every high-end speaker has two sets of binding posts. Almost no one uses both of them.

In practice, a simple jumper connects the two sets on the speaker side, and one set of amp terminals sits idle. You'd never know the second pair existed. But those extra binding posts aren't a design oversight — they're a remnant of a different era, and the story behind them says something interesting about how far amplifier design has come.

The idea was bi-amping: running a separate amplifier to each section of the speaker. One amp drove the woofers; another drove the midrange and tweeter. And for a long time, this made good sense.

In the early days of solid-state amplifier design, very few amps could do both ends of the frequency spectrum well. Some had tremendous bass — tight, powerful, authoritative — but their top end made you cringe. Bright, edgy, hard. Others were silky smooth in the highs but delivered a soft, vague, ill-defined bottom. The solution was to combine two amps: use the one with the great bass for the woofers and the one with the lovely top end for everything above the crossover point. It was clever, and it worked.

Today, that problem is essentially gone. Modern high-end amplifiers are genuinely capable across the full frequency range. The engineering that once made it impossible to have excellent bass and excellent treble from a single design has been solved many times over. Running two amplifiers to solve a problem that no longer exists adds complexity without benefit.

Progress doesn't always feel like progress — sometimes it just quietly removes a headache you'd learned to live with.

This is one of those cases. Two binding posts, one jumper, one great amplifier.

Onward.