I know this is an old video but I’d like to add my 2 cents. What Paul is referring to is commonly called passive bi-amping, accomplished by taking the shorting straps off the 2 sets of speaker inputs. The first question is always is it worth it? The answer is it depends. Using 2 unused channels in the average AVR the answer is no. Most AVRs will drop output with the addition of more speakers. On typical 2 and 3 way speakers it maybe worthwhile if you are using say a tube amp to drive the mids and highs and solid state to drive the lows. But they must have the same gain or it will really mess up the sound. I have read that the LF driver will typically consume 65-75% of the power supplied to the speaker and that usually around 250HZ is usually the dividing point in sound reproduction. In other words 50% is used to produce sound below 250 and 50% is used to produce sound above 250. This is why a smaller amp can be used to drive the mids and highs. As far as the power increase there would be one, albeit a small one. For example if you used 2 identical 100 watt amps the woofer would have almost the entire 100 watts dedicated to it (rating minus the power lost in the crossover to raise the impedance of the higher frequencies). The mids and highs would also have 100 watts. However, they would only use a fraction of the 100 watts available to them. I have been using a passive bi-amp to drive my JBL L7 speakers. They are a 4 way design with a passive subwoofer and separate mid bass. They cross the sub at about 180HZ and it does make a difference in my case. 1 channel is dedicated to driving the sub and another is dedicated to driving the mid bass, midrange and tweeter. These are very power hungry speakers and I’m using 4 channels of an Outlaw Audio 7200 (7X200) to drive them as the fronts in my 5.1 set up. I have a pair of JBL L5 for my surrounds which are a step down in the same series that are also 4 way with a smaller sub and mid bass but share the same mid and tweeter. However they don’t have bi-amping ability. I do a lot of listening in all channel stereo and the fronts overwhelm the rears despite being 10’ further away and are only rated 1DB higher in their sensitivity rating. In my case as I see it I have close to 200 watts for the sub and 200 watts for everything else since I’m close to the dividing point. I will close by saying I believe I would be better off driving them with a 400 watt amp. But there are not a lot of affordable choices in 400 watt amplifiers so I do this as the next best thing. If I had a typical 2 or 3 way speaker, I probably wouldn’t do it either.
I have been bi-amping and tri-amping and even Quad-amping for 30+ years. I have all the amplifiers and more to do so, so why not. I say if you have the ability DO IT!
Omg .... that was painful ! The woofer and the tweeter both have filters to prevent respective high and low frequencies from driving them ..and each looks like 8 ohms to its amplifier
The passive high pass filter in the high frequency speaker circuit increases impedance at low frequencies. The passive low pass filter in the low frequency speaker circuit increases impedance at high frequencies. The impedance of high and low frequency speaker circuits in parallel is the nominal impedance of the speaker.
In a nutshell - biamping eases the power amplifier's job in driving the speakers, although going for the full active route eases further your power amp's burden in driving the speakers.
Not noticable. But you do get benefits of different sound7nt amps working together to get better sound than one of them did alone. I.e one better bass and one better highs.
in this specific case with a single receiver trying to bi amp, that can't be done. the receiver still only have one power supply. and i like to add a question myself: when we bi amp it is usually the woofer having a impedance drop, so then the bi amped speakers will only affect the impedance drop to the amps driving the woofer? A low impedance is the problem and are not not carried over to the top part of the speaker i think. one of many benefits from a bi amped speaker, like adding more power supplies.
It can be done and is beeing done. Many newer sourround recivers offer this option to assign the 2 extra surround channels to bi-amp mode. One power supply or not does not really matter. Still 5 or more amps in a surround reciver. But bi-amping on a single amp is just dumb and makes no sense. Main point is to have one amp with better higs and one with better lows.
@@sudd3660 The benefit is two different sounding amps working together fir overall better sound. There are plenty of HiFi high-end surround recivers so that's not true. But there is no real benefit in bi-amping from the same reciver anyway.
If using a receiver with bi-amp option is there not a benefit in reducing work load on the amp? Rather than pushing one channel’s wattage to both you can push full channel potential to tweeters as well as drivers? Forgive me as I have yet to hit puberty in this sport...
NO..Not if you do it properly using the low-level signal and feeding it into its own dedicated amp. The output of that amp goes to the secondary speaker terminals which are typically just connected to mids&tweeters. Many speakers have a switch for this by the speaker terminals so the LF section of crossover network is switched out and the signal routed properly.
Well that was an easy one but it made me think. If you Bi-Amp, the two amps will see as Paul says a very high impedance for the frequencies the "other" driver is operating. To avoid amplifiers loosing (precise) control because they have no load at some frequencies, would it not be a sound improvement to place a 100 Ohm resister in parallel to their (partial) load? I got this idea because some people practice this with tweeters that tend to have very high impedance s at high frequencies due to the voice coil inductance.
Amplifiers do not have a problem with high impedance loads. Amplifiers have a problem with low impedance loads. Amplifiers can run with no problem into an open circuit. Amplifiers do not "loose control" because they have no load.
I read an interesting quote about connecting full range cables with single amping on the AQ site. I do hear a difference and wonder how this can be explained? "For 2-way speakers, be sure to put the red connector to treble + and black connector to bass -. This is the only way to preserve the tonal voice the speaker designer intended."
Danny at GR Research shows impedance graphs of the speakers he's working on. You can see the impedance rise and fall with the different frequencies. Check out their RU-vid channel.
@@LaGataNegra3073 They are in parallel. The formula for the combined impedance of two parallel impeadances is: Ztotal = (Z1*Z2)/(Z1 + Z2) The trick is that the impedance of both the woofer and tweeter change with frequency do to the action of their crossover filters. So at 100Hz, the impedance of the woofer might be 8 ohm but the impedance of the tweeter might be 100k ohm. (100k * 8)/(100k + 8) = 7.99936... ohm Or basically 8 ohm. If you analyze the formula, you will find that when you have one of the parallel impedances that is much larger than the other, that the combined impedance will basically be equal to the lower impedance.
Hi everyone. I have a dual mono power amp that may be used for passive bi-amping through its A/B speaker selection. Let’s suppose I use A to connect to the tweeter and B to connect to the bass pots, what happens to the amp? Does it see a different impedance load? I ask this because it’s written on it that with A or B working (one at a time) the impedance goes from 4 to 16 ohm per speaker, while it rises to 8 to 16 when A and B are simultaneously activated. My speakers work between 4 and 8 ohms, do I risk to damage my power amp?
I think you need to explain the difference between bi-amping and that other silliness, bi-wiring. Also, in a bi-amping mode, the woofer and tweeter are disconnected from the common input of the filter cirtuit
Bi-amping akd bi-wiring can have benefits. I.e one amp has better lows and the other better highs so together they sound better. And bi-wiring can do the same but not as noticable as bi-amping. And if the speaker has a common ground it can easily be fixed. But many do not have that.
@@Oystein87 You know, after years and years of spending money and wasting time to get a certain sound signature. I've come to the conclusion that THE two manufacturers who made the biggest impact on MY ears and soul are Bang and Olufsen and Bose. People can say what they like. I've witnessed Bose completely trash huge monoblocks and behemoth speaker systems
@@Trev9 Hahahahaha🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 I never witnessed Bose manage to trash anything. Even their biggest and most expencive home systems lacks huge areas in the freq. range between the bass module and speakers. Ok for movies, bad for music. That's Bose in general. And B&O.. Yes, they have some good sounding products. But not for the price they demand. B&O are basicly a "Pay more, get less" company.
@@Trev9 Depends on the budger, use, needs etc. So not easy to just give an easy answer. Atleast if you care about the sound quality. If not then basicly anything is good.. I would prefer listening to the components and it depends if it's a main system or a secondary one etc. It would cost whatever the budget is and play nicer than Bose.
There are plenty of weirdo speakers out there too. My Harman 3-ways have the woofer and mid combined together on the bottom post. Tweeter is on its own. Back of the enclosure says 8 ohms, but all the speakers are 6 ohm Vifas. Not an issue, unless you have amps that aren't rated for 6 ohms or you weren't aware of their trick to draw just a little more power from the amps.
Uhm.. That's not weird but pretty normal... And what ohm it says on the drivers is not the same as what the amp "sees" after the crossover etc.. I see you have missunderstood something here. FYI: A amp can have written i.e "8-16ohms" and still have no issue driving 4ohm speakers.. Atleast an amp from this decade.
@@Oystein87 Nothing misunderstood. I used a multimeter on the posts of the speakers. Its mislabeled. Either an oversight or on purpose. I have several home use power amps that I use because they are rated 4 ohm safe.
@@1rexrex Well.. The rated ohm is nominal. Not constant. So speakers might have a slightly different resistance when just messuring like that. Don't need to je "rated" for 4ohms.. Unless it's a 80s amp it's no problem. My amp says 8ohm. I drove my old big 4ohm speakers really easy. But now I have 8ohm speakers.
Hey Paul, what about when the impedance of the tweeter and the impedance of the mid bass driver in a speaker are rated differently? Is there a best way to bi amp them in that case, vertically or horizontally?
aqua net is for the bed of the 3d printer, to get the filament to stick to the bed of the printer. Maybe the hammer is to install something, or test the structure of the part?
Get a component measurement device like DATS and measure the by-amp-able speaker in question in the 3 arrangements discussed here by Paul and overlay the 3 resulting Graphs of Impedance and Phase in a program like OmniMic or REW. Then you'll have a greater and clearer understand of this topic of discussion. If you can't do that, then watch some GR Research videos. ;) :)
For some reason I always thought my Paradigm Studio 60 v1 were wired to have the mids and highs on one binding post and the woofer on the lower one. Nope. I just tested and with only the top binding post only the tweeter is on. The only reason I can see somebody may want to bi-amp these days is that they may have two extra channels of amplified outputs. Example I bought a 7 channel receiver 150wx7. They decided to only go 5 channels. The main speakers have dual binding posts but perhaps it’s wired to play mids/highs with one post and the stand alone woofer or woofers with the other binding post.
The main reason for bi-amping is to have one amp with better highs and one with better lows. There will be no benefit regarding to power so only people who missunderstood how things work do that to get more power. And I am pretty sure the surround reciver is not actually 7x 150w. Maybe peak at 1kHz 1ch driven 1% or more THD. Most are rated wrong. NAD and some others rate theirs correctly and therefore rate lower numbers.
@@Oystein87 I understand your “theory” concept but it’s not very “practical”. There are issues with putting this theory in practice and we know this. Most don’t go through the trouble and hassle of doing this. Are you currently doing this yourself and you did so on purpose? Most end up going this route on “accident” or they were lucky to stumble upon on extra amp and thus gave it a try. Ideally one of the amps has to be integrated also or have input gains because this way you can balance out the volume/gain between the lows and highs. Another example is what you’re leading on to pertaining 7x150w at 1khz. Some may think they are missing something and happen to get a hold of or buy a separate two channel amp with more power. But they stop and think well what am I going to do with 2 channel outputs then. They may consider bi amping. Most amateurs would put the receivers output to the tweeters also and put the new amp to the woofers/mids for the mains. They may not necessarily achieve what they desire. Something to consider also. If “bi-amping” was really a good thing (cost / benefit) the companies would design amps as you described. A certain Class A section for the mids/highs and Class D or Class A/B for the lows. Pre-amps would he designed with 2 left and right channel outs...not just one each. This doesn’t seem to be happening en mass.
@@f430ferrari5 It's not a theory but a fact. Different amps sound different. That's why it makes sense. And there are really not much issues. Just more cost. No, I have no need to do it myself. But I know it works great. Most go this route because they want to. No, not really.. They just need to have the same gain and both can be power amps if you want. And the rest I don't even bother with
@@Oystein87 what do yo mean “fact”. If you’re not doing it yourself in “practice” then like I said you’re just working off “theory”. I don’t have a problem with your “theory”. Sure amps sound different but they don’t cause enough of a net positive difference for a whole bunch of folks to “purposely” go down this path. You know I am correct. If anybody is bi-amping it’s more by accident. If you think your theory is correct and so good then put it in practice. There is a reason why you don’t even bother. 😂🤣
@@f430ferrari5 I have tested and it's a wide known fact. No, I am not. Heard several systems. Depends on the speakers and amps. No rules here. It's not by accident.. Basicly no one does that. I have no need doing it myself since both my amps sound the same and I like the sound in the whole freq range....🤦♂️
IMHO no. The crossover point is a function of resistance of the driver dictating frequency. So for a simple case, take a first order hi pass filter to the tweeter. It is a simple capacitor. To set the crossover frequency you take the desired frequency and the impedance of the driver and you get the specified cap value. For a 4kHz cross over to a 8 ohm tweeter you need a 5uF cap. Then the amp sees 8ohms above 4kHz and steadily increasing below 4kHz.
Wrong explanation....Did more circles around the topic than a nascar race and said that ohms would not be affected bit frequency would from a amplifiers perspective......last time I checked amps did not come with a perpective.....yet nobody calls him out on his mumbo jumbo explanation..
The guy doesn't understand. Driving the woofers and tweeters seperately is no different than having two seperate stereo systems. It's still 8 ohms for each set up.
if yu understand can you explain me something i have 4 ohms bi speakers and receiver is 8 ohm,,what if i connect them in series ,,would it be speakers 8 ohm than .,,do you know
You must be a politician at Heart to speak for so long and say so little is a skill onto itself doesn’t help anything other than you of course you never Explain the true advantage of bi amp,these are well Established in documents by the audio engineer in society Basically 4:1 years power diffidence is needed with the required crossover probably active with a good slope , I like 24DB per octave I the slope sounds best but it is very hard to make passive Ask speaker wire is a well traveled subject and
How much would it cost you to bi-amp?. Didn't cost me a dime. Just a few feet of decent cable. The spare amps were assignable and came with the unit. So, cost?
@@jonnsmusich Of you use the extra surround channels in your surround reciver for bi-amping then there is no real benefit...😝 You really wont get more power as most think. For that you need bigher amps or run bridge mode. The real benefit with bi-amping is using 2 different amps. I.e one amp with better highs and one amp with better lows.
Sonicly there is a benefit if one amp has better lows and the other better highs etc. There are benefits in some cases so then it's not a waste of money😉
@@Oystein87 Exactly right. For each speaker one amp goes to the tweeter and one to the woofer. Start with a higher end amp and then use the inbuilt program to assign the amps. Easy to do and no cost.
@@jonnsmusich I think you missunderstood me.. Bi-amping frome the same reciver/amp as you describe brings no real benefit.. Bi-amping only makes sense with two physicly seperate and different amps. So no.. Don't waste the time on assigning channels for bi-amping.. Get two different amps instead. I.e: Your sorround reciver drives the tweeters and a different and seperare stereo amp drives the woofers.
