Bi amp or bi wire?

[admin_exported]

Which is best bi amp OR bi wire? Or DO They do verY dIFFERENT things? I am running cable to Neat Elite SX Bi Wire reveals the music details bi amp gives power. Or is this Too simple ?DDD

 

[Anonymous]

You need a power amp to bi amp. What amp have you got?

 

[Anonymous]

I have the Astin Trew pre/ power 1000 /5000

So at the moment I can run bi wire to the Neats if I wanted to from the pre and as you say would need a second power to bi amp .

But what's the potential musical gain - am I better to bi wire only or bi amp only or both ?

The Neats are made for both but I am after more detail not more power

Thanks

 

[JamesOK]

I used to have an Arcam A85/P85, with the A85 powering higher frequencies and P85 power low frequencies (via bi amping). The difference in sound was quite astonishing.

 

[Anonymous]

Biamping gives more detail as you are providing a dedicated amp to the HF. There is very little more power as the LF takes most of it.

Mono- blocking (providing separate amp for each speaker) gives more power.

I'm not sure what bi-wiring does!

 

[Anonymous]

in my opinion bi-wiring offers no improvements to sound. infact my speakers are now single wired and they sound better.

Biamping is the way to go, but much more expensive.

Stan

 

[Bodfish]

Bi-amping is where you get the benefit, not in bi-wiring...IMHO and all that....

 

[Anonymous]

bi wiring will often make a miniscule or no difference but bi amping should make a significant and clearly noticeable improvement in sound.No comparison between the two.

 

[SteveR750]

This was my experience of bi-amping etc:

Cyrus 8XPd in integrated setting is baeline

XPd + one X Power (so bi-amping) improvement factor of 2

XP d pre out to 2 x X Power in mono improvement factor of 5

This was with a pair of Spendor A5 I was really impressed with the mono bloc set up, I wasn't listening any louder, but the sounds just opened up with much better dynamics and space around each instrument. However, to put it into a real world context a stupid amount of money for such little absolute sound improvements. Going from my previous NAD / B&W system to my current was a much much bigger jump in sound quality.

I'm increasingly cynical that top end hi fi is just taking the wee price wise, I understand the need to recover hours of R&D cost amortised into a selling price and all that, but there are plenty of business models of high price / low volume vs low price / high volume for the same product cost to market. Are you really getting VFM on anything over £1k let alone £2k?