Question about Active Bi-amping


Curious about Active Bi-Amping.

My understanding is that to setup an actual active Bi-Amp (with compatible speakers), you would need either 2 mono block amps per speaker or 2 stereo amps and a External Crossover?

Would the Crossover in the Speaker need to be bypassed or removed?

OR

If you were to do Passive Bi-Amping, you would connect each amp directly to the speaker terminals but how would you connect the Amp Signal connections back to a pre-amp or Integrated since most are only have a a simple left and right output?

Thanks

 

128x128jay73

 As @erik_squires noted, with most speakers the stock/internal crossover is not simply a set of filters that divides the entire input signal into two separate frequency bands, one for the woofer the other for the tweeter (or tweeter/midrange driver). The internal crossover in most loudspeakers also includes components (resistors, capacitors, etc.) that tailor the response of the drivers. External analog crossovers provide only "textbook" filters (1st/2nd/3rd/4th-order, which creates a 6, 12, 18, or 24 dB roll-off at the top or bottom of a driver's response). A textbook crossover can NOT provide driver compensation networks. It couldn't, as all loudspeakers have different ones for their specific drivers used in the way the speaker designer employs the drivers.

However, there ARE some loudspeakers which have internal crossover which do not include driver compensation networks. Magnepan, for instance. In Magnepan's pre-.7 iterations of their loudspeakers, the drivers were run in parallel, so they could be separated from one another for bi-amping. When Magnepan introduced the .7 version of each model (1.7, 3.7, 20.7) they went to a series configuration, which means the drivers can not be separated for bi-amping (at least not without doing "surgery").

Thanks everyone for your feedback, I will review the info that you have provided.

@ditusa , right now I am just contemplating and researching the topic.

I have Martin Logan Motion 40's and wouldn't mind getting more performance out of them.