mixing tube and solid state amps


I currently am driving N802's with a CJ2500. Is it a good idea to bi-amp with a tube amp? Solid state for the bottom, tubes for the mid's and high's.
larryrosen
That is what I thought I would do. What is the right way to do this? Isn't just as simple as using the binding post's on my speakers? What am I missing here. What are the advantages to adding an active cross-over, over using the speakers?
Yes, It works well. I have a C-J Premier 11 tube amp and a C-J MF2250 being fed with two sets of pre-amp cables from my C-J Premier 17LS. I have then two seperate sets of speaker cables, one from each amp to the speakers. The tube amp powers the mid/high frequency. The solid state amp powers the bass. Not all speakers have two seperate hook ups, so beware. I went to this set-up because I felt the bass from the 11 was 'lacking'. It lacks no longer, and I get to keep the sweet sounding tubes at the mid/high frequency, where they sound their best!
Regards,
Hey, don't you guys know that tube amps are just distortion mechanisms? Thanks for letting me vent.

Eric Idle
Fatparrot, yes, I had an ARC amp that had input trim pots which I never used but I have to imagine that the quality here is not very good. I would really only want this on my low-frequency amp ... and ultimately it might be the high-frequency amp that needs to be attentuated.

Yes, when you actively biamp, the idea is to remove the speaker's crossover. But this implies an active crossover between the line stage and amp. The advantage of this approach is that you eliminate the poor quality inductors and capacitors that are typical in a speaker's crossover.

In an active crossover, no inductors are needed at all. Another benefit here is that there is often an increase in the speaker's efficiency because of the loss of signal caused by the speaker's crossover. But a problem here is that any poorly implemented active circuit between the line stage and amp can so easily result in the loss of the incredible harmonic richness and 3-dimensionality that some tube-based systems exhibit so well. I am looking to do this in the next month or so with the Space-Tech-Lab tube crossover with tube regulated supply.

Check it out: http://space-tech-lab.com/

If the idea is strictly to have the line stage drive two amps, each amp then driving a stage of the speaker's crossover, you are still biamping but using a passive crossover (the one in the speaker). This latter method is very popular in the UK where just about every speaker has the two sets of terminals (for high and low freqs) and a shorting bar to use only one amp. This is what Quincy above has described.

Hope this helps.

John
I passively bi-amp with VTL MB100 tubes on the top and Sunfire Symphonic Reference on the bottom.
These amps are way out of gain match but I controll the gain of the Sunfire with professional ClearBock balanced line converter that I use to decrease the gain of Sunfire to match VTL.
Also VTL is connected to the high-pass(80Hz -3db and after 12dB per octave) output of preamplifier. THe benefit is to limit the "visible" freequency bandwidth to the amplifier thus significantly decreasing distortions that are quite big in tube amps in the bottom end.