Bi-amping

[poweriscontrol]

Hi, I recently purchased a 5 chanel XPA Amp and am very impressed with its performance....which got me wondering with respect to the performance of the DR 3 channel AMP, so I got one of thes and am completely blown away by the significant tightening  of control as a function of the significant increass in power.

Since I am only running (at the moment) a 5.1 system with the DR 3 running the front three channels and two of the XPA channels running the rear 2 channels......it got me thinking!

What if I was to use the DR to run the low frequency drivers in my speakers and Bi-amped to use the XPA "spare" channels x 2 to run the HF drivers in my speakers.

I already am running a bi-wire configuration and I am interested to know what the consensus would be in adopting this configuration, would it reveal a noticable additional increase in performance....or would the difference in power output potentially cause staging/image issues in the sound-stage.

..Or is it a waste of time and not worth doing?

I have seen some active speakers that run a bi-amp (internal) configuration where the specification of the power amp is greater for the LF drivers than for the HF drivers and so I considered that this may be worth adopting here.

Any feedback - greatfully received.

I am using Revel Ultima Studio FS speakers for the front three speakers and Revel surrounds for the rear channels.

Speaker cable is XLO U6.

[mgbpuff]

This is my opinion only. The Revel speakers you have were designed, tested and aligned for cross over cohesiveness by Kevin Voecks of Revel in the most advanced speaker set up facility probably in the world. I would not bi-amp these speakers unless I used two absolutely identical amps and even then I would question the exact matching of the two amps in every portion of their frequency response. The DR amp and the XPA amp may not have identical gain factors. Your choice, of course, it doesn't hurt to try.

[poweriscontrol]

Hey - thanks for your reply. I had wondered about gain factors on both amps and yes what you say makes a lot of sense! I guess the long and short of it is that there is little point in deconstructing the result of $M of R&D with respect to cross-overs and FR etc.

It may sound different...dose not neccesarily mean better!

[405x5]

Jan 31, 2019 8:54:38 GMT -5 poweriscontrol said:

Hi, I recently purchased a 5 chanel XPA Amp and am very impressed with its performance....which got me wondering with respect to the performance of the DR 3 channel AMP, so I got one of thes and am completely blown away by the significant tightening  of control as a function of the significant increass in power.

Since I am only running (at the moment) a 5.1 system with the DR 3 running the front three channels and two of the XPA channels running the rear 2 channels......it got me thinking!

What if I was to use the DR to run the low frequency drivers in my speakers and Bi-amped to use the XPA "spare" channels x 2 to run the HF drivers in my speakers.

I already am running a bi-wire configuration and I am interested to know what the consensus would be in adopting this configuration, would it reveal a noticable additional increase in performance....or would the difference in power output potentially cause staging/image issues in the sound-stage.

..Or is it a waste of time and not worth doing?

I have seen some active speakers that run a bi-amp (internal) configuration where the specification of the power amp is greater for the LF drivers than for the HF drivers and so I considered that this may be worth adopting here.

Any feedback - greatfully received.

I am using Revel Ultima Studio FS speakers for the front three speakers and Revel surrounds for the rear channels.

Speaker cable is XLO U6.

There are no sonic benefits to bi wiring or bi amping, for the sake of doing so.
If you have a surplus of power amps and adding them to the system, gets you greater headroom without overdriving the speakers, then... you have your advantage.

Bill