# Bi-Amping speakers



## loupy31 (Apr 26, 2006)

Hi,
I have a pair of custom made L/R Front speakers, At the moment it only has a single set of speaker terminals, The crossover looks quite complex, so I am asuming they can be converted to 2 pairs of speaker terminal so I can use a seperate amp for the high/mids and another amp for the woffers.

1/ what differance will one hear single and Bi-Amping

2/ I am asumming the I just need to locate the lowpass and high pass filters, and wire them up accordingly.

Is this correct.

Peter


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## Anthony (Oct 5, 2006)

Usually the HP and LP filter section of the crossover are just wired in parallel to the same terminals, but are independent. The one with the large inductor is usually the woofer section 

Biamping with a passive crossover is more about allowing more precise tuning of levels and matching amps to the sections. For instance, a high current amp that would be great for a subwoofer or woofer might not be ideal for the tweeter. Additionally, if you designed the speakers yourself, you can have sensitivities widely mis-matched and not have to have level matching circuits or falloff filter sections to make sure they sound at the same volume when played through the same amp.

When the tweeter is more sensitive, it's pretty easy to knock it down a little to match (look up L-pad) -- it's just two resistors. When the woofer is more sensitive, it is more difficult to quiet down, since it handles more power and a simple L-Pad would use very expensive resistors to handle the current. If you biamp, though, you can just adjust the gain on the woofer section down and match the levels with no problem.

If you are simply using two channels of the same amp for woofer and tweeter sections, the benefit would be gaining more bandwidth the drive the speakers and not letting a limitation of the amp color the sound. There are some benefits to separating two reactive loads (impedance, group delay, phase, that sort of thing), but I have to admit I'm pretty rusty on that. Hopefully one of our resident electrical engineers will chime in.

Good luck.


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## Kal Rubinson (Aug 3, 2006)

Just to offer an alternate view:
There is no significant advantage to be gained by this effort. If you redesign the speaker to permit active crossover before the amps, one might justify it but to do this for so-called passive bi-amping is a waste of time. There will be no significant increase in power compared to what is obtained more simply with a bigger single amp and, assuming that the original crossover is properly employed, no advantage in mix-and-match amps or level tweaking.

FWIW.


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## Anthony (Oct 5, 2006)

For the most part, I agree with Kal about just using a larger amp, especially when the crossover is properly designed.

The only time I've ever biamped was for full DIY setups with a large mismatch between the tweeter and woofer sections (where the woofer was 6dB more sensitive than the mid/tweet section). I ended up scrapping that design, but biamping was the only thing that would have worked there with those drivers.


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## GranteedEV (Aug 8, 2010)

loupy31 said:


> Hi,
> I have a pair of custom made L/R Front speakers, At the moment it only has a single set of speaker terminals, The crossover looks quite complex, so I am asuming they can be converted to 2 pairs of speaker terminal so I can use a seperate amp for the high/mids and another amp for the woffers.
> 
> 1/ what differance will one hear single and Bi-Amping


What you describe is passive bi-amping. It's a waste of time.



> 2/ I am asumming the I just need to locate the lowpass and high pass filters, and wire them up accordingly.


If you want to bi-amp, you need to start from scratch and rework an active version of the crossover.


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## bambino (Feb 21, 2010)

I would have to agree with the above posters. Unless you actively Bi-amp i don't believe you will hear any significant change in sound, i think the best bet would be to buy a more powerful amp or go Active.:T


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## loupy31 (Apr 26, 2006)

Wow,
Well thanks to all you guys for that info, I guess I will stay with the current setup.
Actually the reason I asked about Bi-amping was to get more out of my system and I have 3 power amp modules I am not using, so I thought maybe to put them to good use.

Peter


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## Kal Rubinson (Aug 3, 2006)

loupy31 said:


> Actually the reason I asked about Bi-amping was to get more out of my system and I have 3 power amp modules I am not using, so I thought maybe to put them to good use.


Build more speakers.:T


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## hearingspecialist (Mar 15, 2010)

One thing not mentioned which could be a possible advantage is the independant level setting within the receiver. My Yamaha allows that tuning as such which could provide some benefit.


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