Finally, it all starts to sound right!

[admin_exported]

It's taken a while, a lot of fiddling and a few sessions of re-wiring, but I've finally got the system sounding right. So I'm basically quite happy and looking forward to an eventual disc spinner upgrade. But not yet. Lack of finances will happily coincide with the HD market bringing out new boxs so a timely wait is in order. So, you wondering what I did to make me happy with the sound at last? No? Oh well, I'm going to say anyway ;-p It's really the front speaker pair that have been giving me trouble. The Dali set up is very bright in general and I like the treble tone. It's very precise and accurate sounding. But the big Dali Ikon 6s have been sounding a bit slow and not giving of their taught tight best. I had previously wired my front three speakers through my Audiolab power amp in bi-amped configuration. Bass drivers all from one internal board and treble drivers all from the other. Thus attempting to give some separation to the bass and treble. It worked, but not brilliantly. The sound was good. But 100w just never really got the bass section going. I then stumbled onto the idea of bi-wiring the front pair and using the Audiolab in bridged mode for the front pair, gving 150 per channel instead of 100. Frankly I couldn't tell the difference between this and the bi-amped configuration. Also, I re-connected the centre speaker to the Denon amp and re-wired it as bi-wired off one amplifier channel. Seems quite happy. Then a revelation hit me. Why can't I bi-amp the front pair again, but this time use the bridged channels for the bass on left and right, and the non-bridged standard 100w channels for the treble. So again, one board is doing all the bass, and the other circuit board is doing the treble. But what it also means is that the front pair are now utilising 6 amplifier channels between them and the bass in the Ikon 6s has tightened up a bit, though it doesn't appear louder or unbalanced. which I'd feared might have happened with 150w to the bass and 100w to the treble. I'm feeling much better about buying the Audiolab now. I was beginning to wonder whether I'd made a mistake and should have just bought an Onkyo 875 to replace the Denon, but I like the old beast, so I'm finally glad I kept it! Here's to the future! All the best everyone. Will

 

[Anonymous]

I'm glad your feeling better- after reading your thread about bridging and rivers I had to have a lie down. Will now take a degree to work out -speak in about three years time....

 

[Anonymous]

Ha! Bridging is using two amplifiers at once to create one more powerful amplifier. Some stereo amps let you "bridge" the two channels to create, in effect, a mono amp with more power than either one of the two previous amplifier channels. (Why not just buy a more powerful one in the first place? - well, this is an upgrade path some amps offer. Keeps your flexibility). My Audiolab 8000x7 has 7 amplifiers in it, but you can bridge two pairs of amps (that's 4 channels) into 2 more powerful "bridged" amps. Which is what I've done.

Let me know if that doesn't make sense. Maybe Andrew can step in and explain a little. Quite interesting, how it actually works.

 

[Anonymous]

So you would connect each speaker between the amps seperating the tweeters and woofers?

 

[Anonymous]

Yes, my left speaker has two sets of speaker cables going to it. (using bi-wire cable to keep things tidy). The first pair are for the bass section of the speaker and they're going to one of the bridged amp channels. The second pair of speaker cables are for the treble section and are running to one of the standard amplifier channels. This is repeated for the right hand speaker.

It's only possible to do this because I have some "Y" - phono cables to connect my pre-amp to the power amp. Effectively I take one pre-out (say for the left channel) and split it into two cables to go into the power amp. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to amplify the same sounds, seperately in the power amp.

Hope that's not too confussing. I'd draw it, but I have no access to the advanced formating options!!!!!! Still!!!!!!

 

[Anonymous]

That's interesting and clear enough for me! Luckily I'm a beginner so not worrying too much about this yet!

 

[Anonymous]

Well, with your Onkyo 905, you may be able to bridge four of your amps into two for your front pair, which would firm them up a bit. But you'd need to then add an offboard power amp to go back up to a 7.1 channel system if you were running one before. As I said, what I've done might be a bit excessive, using 6 amp channels to power 2 loudspeakers! But they do seem to like it.

Thaiman would no doubt recommend I should have bought a better 2 channel power amp in the forst place and just bi-wired the front pair. But as they say, things always look better in hindsight!

Anyone else have any comments?