Biamping

[Voomie]

I have a prima Luna tube amp and would like to buy amp my cornscala 3-way speakers what would you recommend for a solid-state amp for the bass

[JohnA]

Which amp?  The ones I saw on their web site had plenty of power for home use and you could raise the power with different tubes.  How about a Parasound or Acurus power amp for times you want to shake the walls? 

[Frank1938]

I wouldn't recommend bi-amping the cornscala. Bob's crossover is actually quite good and may be as good as an active crossover. If you choose to do it anyhow, you will need an active crossover as well as another amp. Any good SS amp will work well since it is only reproducing the bass. Just get one with sufficient power.

[YK Thom]

I have often wondered about the value of bi-amping. Does it actually do anything positive? Does it actually improve sound quality? I often read about “timbre” matching in relation to HT, would not using different amps alter the overall sonic presentation of a speaker?

[kevinmi]

I've tried bi-amping and even tri-amping my K-Horns, but I was never satisfied with the sound. It's too hard to get the separate amps to blend in smoothly.Maybe try attenuating the mids/highs instead if you want more pronounced bass.

[JohnA]

Biamping was originally used/developed for pro audio when a Crown DC-300A was a muscle amp.  In a home setting it allows extremely steep crossover slopes and time delays while maintaining correct phase.  Those effects are audible, but the additional expense is too great for the benefit. 

[YK Thom]

11 minutes ago, JohnA said:

Biamping was originally used/developed for pro audio when a Crown DC-300A was a muscle amp.  In a home setting it allows extremely steep crossover slopes and time delays while maintaining correct phase.  Those effects are audible, but the additional expense is too great for the benefit. 

So in effect more of a tool for extreme volumes? I don’t really understand the concept.

[glens]

This whole thing depends on what is meant bi "bi-amping" in the first post.  Running two amps full-range per side through the separated high-level crossover, or low-level crossover before the amps?

 

5 hours ago, YK Thom said:

5 hours ago, JohnA said:

Biamping was originally used/developed for pro audio when a Crown DC-300A was a muscle amp.  In a home setting it allows extremely steep crossover slopes and time delays while maintaining correct phase.  Those effects are audible, but the additional expense is too great for the benefit. 

So in effect more of a tool for extreme volumes? I don’t really understand the concept.

 

I think he was saying that it (low-level crossover / bi-amp?) was initially employed to effectively achieve higher amplification than was otherwise (readily) unavailable.  The other factors mentioned are much more valuable nowadays.  Being able to digitally filter, equalize, and time-align produces very great benefits in quality of sound.  Somewhat expensive, yes, but especially if you've got a woofer several feet into the corner, a midrange at the corner, and a tweeter a foot or more closer yet, well, you've already spent a fair share of money; might as well take things to the next level and get all the drivers producing sound from the same effective distance along with proper phase relationships.  Especially in that case the sound will be much more coherent through the crossover areas.  To that end it would be less of a value proposition for a Heresy, say, but it would still provide better control over the sound being produced.

 

As to the original post, he may well be contemplating running all amps full-range through the speaker's crossovers.  We don't know yet what the plan is.

[YK Thom]

5 hours ago, glens said:

This whole thing depends on what is meant bi "bi-amping" in the first post.  Running two amps full-range per side through the separated high-level crossover, or low-level crossover before the amps?

 

 

I think he was saying that it (low-level crossover / bi-amp?) was initially employed to effectively achieve higher amplification than was otherwise (readily) unavailable.  The other factors mentioned are much more valuable nowadays.  Being able to digitally filter, equalize, and time-align produces very great benefits in quality of sound.  Somewhat expensive, yes, but especially if you've got a woofer several feet into the corner, a midrange at the corner, and a tweeter a foot or more closer yet, well, you've already spent a fair share of money; might as well take things to the next level and get all the drivers producing sound from the same effective distance along with proper phase relationships.  Especially in that case the sound will be much more coherent through the crossover areas.  To that end it would be less of a value proposition for a Heresy, say, but it would still provide better control over the sound being produced.

 

As to the original post, he may well be contemplating running all amps full-range through the speaker's crossovers.  We don't know yet what the plan is.

Interesting but I fail to understand how this concept would be of any value for use with a single loudspeaker - all components of which are housed within the same box. If said drivers within that speaker are not in time alignment I would say there is a seriously major flaw with that speaker and it’s design.

[glens]

Khorns, Jubilees, LaScalas, Cornwalls, Fortes,  Heresys, ...  None of them are time-aligned as delivered.  Flawed in some ways yes (completely unavoidable no matter make, model, or price); "seriously majorly flawed"?  Some would argue that, but usually not around here.

[Chris A]

For those of you that don't understand the benefits of bi-amping or tri-amping, see the following thread (stickied to the top Technical/Modifications subforum):

 

 

19 hours ago, Voomie said:

...what would you recommend for a solid-state amp for the bass

Virtually anything that's relatively clean and has a few watts of low harmonic distortion output. (That's a lot of choices.)

 

I would probably use a new ICEpower 50ASX2 stereo module with a Ghent housing (DIY from ebay sources--with unbalanced RCA connections), or if I'm really lazy--a used Crown D-75A (which already has balanced connections).  Both choices are less than $175. Used Crown D-75As once went for less than $100 (each) on ebay when I acquired a bunch of them 10 years ago.

 

I find that the much more important amplifier is the HF one...the one that you say you already own ("Prima Luna tube amplifier"). 

 

In order to do a proper job, you need to measure what you've got with an active crossover.  Save some of those amplifier dollars to buy a UMIK-1 from miniDSP.  Use REW to measure (freeware) and help you set your EQ correctly for your room and loudspeaker placement.  (There are many "how to" tutorials on using REW to measure...here's one--and you don't need the stuff in the video on calibrating your microphone if you're using a UMIK-1):

 

 

Here's a thread on that subject of setting up your DSP crossover EQ using REW:

 

 

Chris

[JohnA]

On 2/2/2019 at 2:04 PM, YK Thom said:

So in effect more of a tool for extreme volumes? I don’t really understand the concept.

 

Extreme volumes? Yes, originally, yes. 

 

But with the crossover technology developed for the pro audio world, you can now add steep crossover slopes, done in the digital domain so original phasing is preserved, and digital time delays to correct for driver alignments and get better sound.  For home use, 3 D75s at 45 wpc should be plenty to drive any Klipsch 3-way even though the total power/channel is about the same as my A125x5. 

 

[YK Thom]

How out of alignment would a speaker need to be before you could notice or sense it? I can’t cant recall ever being able to consciously notice this with any speaker I have ever heard.

[glens]

17 hours ago, YK Thom said:

22 hours ago, glens said:

... if you've got a woofer several feet into the corner, a midrange at the corner, and a tweeter a foot or more closer yet, well, you've already spent a fair share of money...

Interesting but I fail to understand how this concept would be of any value for use with a single loudspeaker - all components of which are housed within the same box. If said drivers within that speaker are not in time alignment I would say there is a seriously major flaw with that speaker and it’s design.

 

I was referring specifically there to a Klipschorn, which indeed has all its components housed in the same box

[Chris A]

1 hour ago, YK Thom said:

How out of alignment would a speaker need to be before you could notice or sense it? I can’t cant recall ever being able to consciously notice this with any speaker I have ever heard.

Once I get all the drivers aligned and EQed flat with smoothly varying phase across the crossover band(s), if I dial off the time alignment/phase by as little as 90 degrees at the center crossover frequency, the overall timbre of sound changes (sometimes dramatically).  These time delays to do that are a function of frequency, of course, with high frequencies being very small values of time delays--measured in a few microseconds.  For instance, 90 degrees of phase misalignment at 6 kHz is 41µs (that's microseconds, not milliseconds).

 

Chris

[glens]

Years and years ago I was at the local college library thumbing through some old (even then) audio-related books.  I'd like to be able to provide a concrete reference, maybe I'll find one later, but I recall something about early sound movies and tap dancing where the taps were being reproduced through a crossover region between horns of different length causing an objectionable multiple-instance of the taps occuring in the theater.

[YK Thom]

Interesting but a few steps above my pay grade. Does that mean this sort of thing cannot be dealt with through the crossovers or some other internal solution?

[Chris A]

11 hours ago, YK Thom said:

Does that mean this sort of thing cannot be dealt with through the crossovers or some other internal solution?

Besides mounting the HF drivers in specially designed boxes with the correct amount of set back to compensate for the differences in driver acoustic centers within a loudspeaker, plus phase delays introduced by the passive crossover networks themselves, the only other alternative is to use digital delays to correct the phase/time misalignments within the loudspeakers themselves (i.e., provided by DSP crossovers).

 

And physical set back of drivers can only correct for the on-axis time alignments, not those time misalignments far off axis.

 

It's the same story for on-axis frequency response in-room, with DSP crossovers easily providing the necessary EQ corrections that are quite difficult to implement in passive crossovers.

 

Chris

[Voomie]

My plan was to use the passive crossover I originally got from Bob.when It arrived it was already wired for bi amping I had to put a jumper cable in to run it on my single amp . I recently purchased the Prima Luna prologue five with the ps audio steller dac. It sounds great but just wanted to see the difference with biamping. Why do I need a active crossover and why can't I just use the one it came with.

[glens]

You can, and that's the sort of "bi-amp"ing I'd suspected you were talking about in the first place.  All you'll have to do is match the gains of the amps (when/if they're different amps) used lows-to-highs which will be simple if at least one of the two have gain controls.

 

All this other talk is about something completely different and represents taking things to a whole new level.