Bi-amping and Bi-wiring

[admin_exported]

heres something I've bene curiouys about. say you biamp to bi-wired speakers. Is it better to have amplifier A driving the left and B the right, or A driving the treble half and B the bass half? The latter would lose you the channel separation benefit... but the treble would benefit from a more stable power supply. I guess you could use a lower powered (gain matched) amp for the treble too. I guess monoblocks are the real answer hehe.

 

[Anonymous]

http://whathifi.com/forums/t/1751.aspx this might answer some of it

 

[Anonymous]

That would be sending the left to the tweeters and the right to the woofers, which would make the stereo sound rediculous.

 

[Anonymous]

Man is there some confussion on this subject. Primarily due to the fact that many people posting on bi-wiring and bi-amping think the two are vaguely related, (not you Richard!)

I am about to wire up my 7 channel Audiolab power amp for bi-amping purposes to the front 3 speakers in my setup.

I also have to work out which duties to assign each amplifier channel to.
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Plan A: My main interest is in understanding how the power supply supplies the boards on which the amp channels are based. It appears that there are 2 boards in the box. One has 4 channels and the other has 3 channels. So, I'm proposing to use the 4 channel board for the left (hi and low) and the centre (high and low) leaving the board that only has 3 channels for just the right (high and low). At least this way I should have some power supply seperation between the L & R channels in pure stereo listening mode.
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Plan B:Now with a 4 and a 3 I could take a different approach and take the front 3 high frequency drivers off the 3 amp board and the 3 low frequency drivers off the 4 amplifier board. Assuming the two boards draw their power from different coils on the transformer, this should give some isolation between treble and bass.
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So, do I go with plan A or plan B?

 

[Anonymous]

I would put the high level on one board and the low on the other, see my diagram. I say this as the main reason for biwiring and biamping is to reduce the bass having the drowning effect on the treble. I assume you are not using a separate amplifier to power rear channels?

L [-+] SL [-+] C [-+] R [-+] High Level
L [ -+] SR [-+] R [-+] Low Level

I had better explain this diagram; L = Left, R = Right, C = Cente, S= Surround.

Thats how I would do a 5.1 biamped front channel set up.

 

[Anonymous]

That came out nothing like I wanted it to. So here goes again.

4 Channel board --

Left HF Surround Left, Centre, Right HF

 

[Anonymous]

3 Channel board -- Left LF, Surround Right, Right LF

 

[Anonymous]

There! That separates the hight and low of the fronts to two different boards. Which is what I think will sound best. You must at least commend me for my efforts. 🙂

 

[Anonymous]

I do commend you, I have already in fact, on another thread! Ok, so you should also know that my surround speakers and 2 rear speakers are being powered by my Denon AVC A10SE so are not being powered at all by the power amp. I'm using 6 channels from the power amp to bi-amp all three of my fronts for tonal and volume balance!

Will experiment with all treble on one board and bass on the other, and left + centre on one board and right on the other. Will let you know which works out better at the weekend, need cables to arrive before it can all be hooked up!

 

[Andrew Everard]

... Must dig out that DVD of Groundhog Day...

 

[Anonymous]

Yeah yeah yeah, ok someone has been here and done it before ;-) That wouldn't be YOU would it Andrew :-D

 

[Anonymous]

[quote user="richardjlarby"]That would be sending the left to the tweeters and the right to the woofers, which would make the stereo sound rediculous.[/quote]

not if you set the inputs to the amps properly!... and this is talking about using stereo amps, not monoblocs

in the case of amp a driving left and amp b driving right... then two lots of left channel signal go into A and right channel for b.

If you are driving the treble with a and the bass with b then amp and b both get the normal stereo input.

 

[Andrew Everard]

One stereo amp for both treble channels, the other one for both bass channels.

 

[Anonymous]

yes that's exactly what I meant...

you think this is better than one stereo amp for each speaker? makes sense to me... of course quadding beats the lot.

And is there merit to bi-pre-amping?😉

 

[Andrew Everard]

[quote user="Mr_Poletski"]yes that's exactly what I meant...

you think this is better than one stereo amp for each speaker? [/quote]

Yes, as this way the heavy demands of the bass drivers of the speakers won't impinge on the power supply of the amp driving the tweeters.

[quote user="Mr_Poletski"]And is there merit to bi-pre-amping?😉[/quote]

Not even sure what bi-pre-amping is...

 

[Anonymous]

Thanks Andrew, thats what I thought.. I guess my next amp upgrade is a second 8000P then😉

 

[Anonymous]

Bi-pre-amping is overkill! He's suggesting allocating a seperate preamp to each single channel. Maybe one for each driver! I'm envisaging a bank of 15 Tag McLaren AV32R DPs powering 14 monoblocks each running off their own ring main circuit. There'd be no need for central heating with the heat that would be generated and I have no doubt it would sound great, but I think suicide may happen soon after if anyone doing this got their hands on an iPod Touch and decided this was more fun. Can you hear the screamsssssssssssssssss. LOL