ALK Crossover Biamped

[Dylanl]

Is there any advantage in Bi-amping this network? I was thinking of Bi-amping my Khorns.

I know you can but it says that a level electronic crossover shold be used ahead of the amps. I think this means an active if so why not an active 3 way?

Any help would be appreciated.

[DrWho]

"Bi-amping" without an electronic crossover upstream is called "fools bi-amping" because it's not a true bi-amp scenario and doesn't totally realize all of the benefits that are typical of true bi-amping. Not to say that there aren't benefits, but I'd say they are minimal at best - which isn't great considering the investment of doubling up on amps.

Now if you're interested in electronic crossovers then by all means go 3-way. And with the khorns you can bust out some awesome time-alignment too. Of course that's not a popular topic so let's not go there []

What kind of budget were you looking at for the project? And what kind of upstream equipment are you running now? (just to get an idea of where you might wanna go). What year khorns you running?

[Al Klappenberger]

Dylani,

Bi-Amping has some advantages and can be done with my universal "ALK" network to divide the squawker and tweeter while an active crossover network AHEAD of two seperate amps divide the woofer / high section. BUT: this has a long list of "gotchas" associated with it. My advice is that if you have to ask about it, DON'T DO IT! I say this becasue it requires an understanding of how to set the levels of all the equipment in the chain with respect to each other and the phasing of the drivers. If you have to ask you probably don't know how to do all this and will probably not have good results. There is also danger to the squawker driver from turn-on thumps depending on the amp that drives the high section since there will be nothing to stop extreme lows from getting from the high amp to the squawker. You also need good test equipment to take advantage of what bi-amping can give you. It will allow you to compensate for time dealy difference between the low and high frequency horns, but only of you have a good way to measure the delay difference or know exactly how much delay to dial into the active netwrok. Bi-Amping is NOT for the novice!

Al K.

[Ki Choi]

Al:

I had mentioned in other post - using the TACT RCS 2.2X room correcting preamp with subwoofer outputs to drive separate power amps for the Khorn bass bins and using the mid/high normal outputs from the RCS to drive another amps to power the squawker and tweeter input of the Klipsch crossovers via its speaker inputs. Basically the idea is to disconnect the wires going down to the bass bin from the crossovers and using it as controlled subwoofer.

The RCS would correct and match levels, delays, phase shifts and all the other anormallites.

I believe above set up should work as biamp set up for Khorns ...whether one needs it or not is for another discussion.

Ki

[Al Klappenberger]

KI,

You obviously know what you are doing and are the type of person who could benefit by the use of the external processor in a bi-amp set up. This is the point I was making. The average person would be totally in th dark about this sort of thing and wouldn't know how to begin! You really need to know this stuff first to do it correctly!

AL K.

[Ki Choi]

Al:

You are too kind. I am no expert in the subject matter. Considering the breath of experiences with the Khorns in this forum, I expected someone to have already tried such a set up and save me the trouble, I hoped.

As soon as I get through with the current projects, I will try the RCS setup with Khorns and will report.

Thanks,

Ki

[DrewBolce]

I have mentioned this before so please forgive me, I just hope someone with enough gumption and resources will try this.

Foobar 2000 is windows media player with great features. François Bourdon has developed the foo_dsp_xover plugin which is an active crossover. With the right soundcard one can use their computer as an active crossover. You could then biamp to the khorns. It even supports time delays.

[Dylanl]

ok

[sherwoodhifi]

DrewBolce,

I am having fun with the foo_dsp_xover plugin now.

Let me paint a picture of my current systems for comparsion. My main system ( I am not allow to fool with it, otherwise my wife will be very mad at me, she loves the sound) is a set of Rosewood Khorns ( with ALK wood horns, JBL tweeters, ALK networks with all Hovland Musicap ), driven by various Mac SS and Mac tube amps or Scott or Fisher or Sherwood tube amps ( nothing fancy or high end stuff ). The sound from the Rosewood Khorns is out of this world, even make my son's heavy rock music sound good.

My other "play" speaker is a set of 1971 KBWO with all stock drivers ( K55V, K77 , BEC AA networks ), the set of KBWO are not in any corners because there isn't any more good corners.

Last month, I wanted to try tri-amp my KBWO without spending a lot of money. I didn't wanted to purchase a hardware crossover box in case I don't like the sound. I will be able to reuse the purchased hardware with a software crossover solution. I picked up a new computer when BestBuy had a sale of eMachine computer ($200), I also brought a Panasonic SA-XR55 6.1 channels HT digital receiver ($150 from Amazon).

First setup, I hooked up the internal 6 channels sound card in the emachine (Hi to SA-XR55 amp, Mid to a HK730 amp, Low to SA-XR55 amp ) to the Khorns. Music player and software crossover is foo2000 with foo_dsp_xover. Installation of foo_dsp_xover was really easy and I was able to play with various crossover setting in no time. Surprisingly, the emachine sound card was not bad, the whole setup have very low noise floor. Sound almost as good as using the stock AA networks.

Next setup, I use a software crossover "Frequency Allocator" from http://www.thuneau.com/ . Same hardware setup without any fancy amplifiers. Thuneau software crossover brings the sound to a higher level, but music is still missing "life" and "emotion". Due to holiday sessons, ususally we have friends and family gathering, I don't want to have wires and amps running over the floors. I haven't tweek or measure the system with RTA yet just by using my ears. This is just my case of proof of concept.

Depends on your goal, if you want to have fun then check out the sofware crossover. If you just want to listen to good sound, buy AL's horn and crossover.