Bi amping opinions

[Alberta Matt]

I have been playing dabbling into separate lately and after playing with a few setups I finally found one I am enjoying but am wondering other than Y splitters if there is a way to Bi amp my speakers with the current set up i have. I have a Denon avr4308ci receiver as my preamp and a Nakamichi PA-1 5 channel amp for power. My speakers are mirage OM9 bipolar towers and as of now I am loving the match but was wondering if anyone has any experience with this amp as there is not alot of info on it, no manual to be found. any advice would be appreciated.

 

[fill35u]

You shouldn't really need much info on that PA-1, just a 100W x 5 power amp, RCA inputs and speaker outputs.

Your OM9 speakers have separate terminals for the woofers and tweeters, but no provision to bypass the internal crossovers. So it would be easy to start by passive bi-amping with just the RCA Y-splitters you mentioned.

If you want the full benefits of active bi-amping, you'd need an active crossover, and to bypass the passive crossovers in the speakers. The main benefits would be better control of the crossover points, hopefully a steeper 24dB/oct L-R crossover, and a gain of around 2dB headroom.

If it were me, instead of bi-amping the highs and lows on separate channels, I'd bi-amp the *front and rear* drivers on separate channels, and play with their relative volumes for effect. That would require a little minor surgery on the speakers to rearrange the wiring, and to re-use the terminals as front & rear instead of high & low.

 

[sqlsavior]

IMO, a few manufacturers including Vandersteen offering bi-wiring capability (and a few offering true bi-amping capability on higher models) led to bi-wiring capability becoming a requirement in some shoppers' minds, and then to that "requirement" being catered to by many other manufacturers down their lines to mid-market models. This led to many folks who get into this hobby past the surface to ponder and experiment with bi-amping using the bi-wiring connections and leaving the passive crossovers in place. Again IMO, a pseudo-requirement has led to a pseudo-application. Nevertheless, some users report improvements, and who am I to pre-judge their value without hearing for myself?

I once made a low-level passive 6 dB/octave filter pair from cut-in-half pairs of of patch cords, plus two resistors and two capacitors to make Y cords separating the highs from the lows, while leaving the passive speaker crossovers in place, making their combined slopes 18 dB/octave. That was for a rather unusual setup to start with, though - two G.A.S. Grandsons in a traditional vertical bi-amp, each driving both channels of their bandpass, into the folded corner-horn bass bins and tops (mid-range horn and tweeter horn each) divided at 500 Hz. But the passive speaker crossovers (which I also made) had an impedance dip that my friend's previous amp didn't like, so that was the setup I wired up for him when I sold him the speakers I had made. It went deafeningly loud. I just don't think the average speaker pair benefits much, but experiment to hear for yourself.