Thank you. It isn't so much the price of the wire, more the pain of feeding it behind my furniture....

An update on bi-wiring:
The sound on my most humble of imaginable systems was good- but only most of the time. Occasionally, it would simply turn awful. For the longest time I couldn't figure out why- then I realized that the culprit was the damn awful metal strapping that connected bi-wiring terminals at the back of my speakers. There was simply no good way of keeping them from shifting.

I bi-wired and now I have the sound I wanted to have from my very modest setup.

Alas, I will never be able to tell whether or not the sound was improved due to bi-wiring or just due to getting rid of those dreadful metal straps.