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bi amp bi wire

E

esoterick

New Member
"bi wire bi amp"



I am building my integrated theater system and assembling my parts now. My goal is amazing imaging,sound stage and great clarity with dynamic transients. I have always been impressed with preciseness of concentric drivers (KEF and Tannoy.) I have acquired quite an array of Kef drivers and in the smaller versions like the Kef better than the Tannoys for voice and Movies.
My Kef speakers are set up for bi amp / bi wire. I understand the bi wire option....its said that i will hear a notable clarity difference. Is that true?
If i bi amp ..will there be another level of improvement in the accuracy, transients and clarity if i do this?
I'm confused about the bi amp set up....if the preamp sends low level signal to the amp...does is get filters (crossover) first then amplified then sent to the driver? does this option require electronic crossovers?
or can the preamp send signal to the manufacturers passive crossover filters then amplify that low level filtered signal to the amplifier then to the driver? Although there is a significant cost increase in All the amplifiers required (6...I will only bi amp LCR) I'm ok with that as long as i can hear the difference at normal listening levels. I don't listen to movies at Loud levels but the crashes and explosions must be loud and quick.
thank you for time it will take to reply and help this old guy out.
 
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Biwiring is, IMO, a waste of wire, PROVIDED you have sufficient gauge cable to begin with.

Bi-amping CAN clean things up, but it depends upon many things within your chain. Synergy is both a talented mistress and a b!t(h~
 
Bi-wire: I've read many explanations of how this works, but none of it makes any sense to me. BTW, I'm an EE who has spent a fair amount of time with analog circuits. That said, you will get lots of opinions on this. My suggestion is to buy the extra wire and let your ears decide. Ignore what everybody else has to say including me.

Bi-Amp: This is a completely different animal, and with the right equipment and preparation will make an enormous difference. I suggest you do a forum search on this as it has already been discussed and explained quite effectively many times here.
 
If you bi-amp, you have to bi-wire. It won't work any other way.

Some say you have to use an active crossover to make bi-amping worthwhile, and that if you do bi-amp, you should bypass (disable?) the crossover inside your speakers. The idea here then is that you have an amplifier channel driving your woofer and another amp channel driving your mids and tweets (I'm assuming that you're speaker only has two sets of binding posts). That is, I believe, the ideal way to do this.

On my system (Pioneer Elite VSX-82TXS, a pair of B&W DSM603 s3s, a B&W LCR600, and a pair of NHT 1.3As), since I'm only driving five speakers, I can configure the receiver to use the two unused amp channels to bi-amp my front speakers. So I do.

Whether that receiver actually has a built-in active crossover for this purpose I can't say. Obviously, it has at least one active crossover in it for driving subwoofer, but my guess is that it probably sends a full-range signal to my main left and right speakers, and then the speakers, through the terminals, handle the crossover in a passive way. I dunno for sure.

Nevertheless, it's crazy what it did for the sound in my system. It could just be that I'm putting an extra 130 watts into each of those speakers. But the sound, especially at high listening levels, is incredibly clear. I don't get any sort of listening fatigue. Things just sound great. Like Tony the Tiger says. It was a noticeable difference that others may ascribe to placebo effect, but I hear it. I like it.
 
Bi-amping and bi-wiring with some home theater receivers (running 6.1 or 7.1 into 2.0) like the panasonic sa-xr series for stereo set ups can be a cost effective way to really improve your SQ
 
Some say you have to use an active crossover to make bi-amping worthwhile,...
Click to expand...

I have seen this claim before too. Surely they mean to say that you need a line level crossover (which I would agree with). It seems that whether it was active, passive or amplified/buffered passive would be a matter of personal taste or philosophy.

I can't imagine that bi-wiring would be worth the cost of the wire but I have not tried it.

mike
 
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