Do I need an active crossover to biamp RF-3s?

[jimmy4300]

Well I'm the Fool.  I've had my RF82s Fools BiAmped for about 5 months now on a Denon AVR1907.  When I did it, it sounded stronger to me with more presence and a little more bass.  It must be all in my head, but I'm leaving it as is.

Lou 

[nezff]

Well I'm the Fool. I've had my RF82s Fools BiAmped for about 5 months now on a Denon AVR1907. When I did it, it sounded stronger to me with more presence and a little more bass. It must be all in my head, but I'm leaving it as is.

Lou

I am wondering the same thing. I just biamped my RF62s on my Onkyo 605. It actually has a place on the rear panel that says BIAMP. I just removed the straps and ran an additional + and - to the right rear channel and the same for the left channel. They do sound a little stronger,could also be just my imagination. I know there is more power going to them correct? My onkyo is rated at 90watts per channel. My 62s take RMS 125 and 500watts peak. Not sure if I did it any good, but I had some leftover speaker wire and bananas laying around, so what the hell.

[DrWho]

When I did it, it sounded stronger to me with more presence and a little more bass.

Is it possible that the gain of your receiver changed? What you describe sounds exactly like all those blind ABX tests where B is the same thing, but like 1dB louder.

[SWL]

I have been going back and forth with Fool's Bi-amping using multiple XTI's and an active crossover..........."To my ears" the Fool's Bi-amping ALWAYS sounds better.........I wish it didn't in a way because I could use the extra amps elsewhere in my house.[]

I have always been in favor of having tone controls...........Could it be that because I'm able to tweak the active crossover that's the sole reason I prefer this method?

[DrWho]

You're using the XTi with an additional active crossover? Mind if I ask how you have all your various configurations hooked up? Why not use the internal DSP of the XTi for your active crossover needs?

[SWL]

Yeah............I was previously doing this with XLS 802's. Since I got the XTI's hooked it up the same way and just really, really like how it sounds. Haven't gotten around to figuring out the DSP yet...........but I intend to.

RCA out of preamp to XLR into the active crossover.............

XLR out of the active crossover to XLR into the XTI 2000's..............

With the jumper removed on the back of the RF-7's.............one amp running the HF's..........the other amp running the LF's.

It seems like a couple of you guys that really know what you're talking about don't believe in "Fool's Bi-amping". I very much respect your knowledge but............Like I said, I've gone back and forth and keep going back to the Fool's Bi-amping method. Call me crazy but it sounds to me that it is actually scratching the surface of true bi-amping..........and if I had the equipment etc. to do real bi-amping, I would.

In the meantime........without anything scientific to back it up, except my own two ears and a lot of experimenting............"Fool's Bi-amping" wih an active crossover is a very cool "tweak", if you will..........and I will keep it this way with no resevations, until I do it with the DSP.[Y][Y][]

[DrWho]

Ah, there's your problem....removing the binding straps on the input terminal to your speakers does not bypass the crossover. So if you're adding a crossover upstream, then that is getting added on top of the highpass filter for the tweeter and the lowpass filter for the woofers. What you will end up with is steeper slopes, but you'll also have a big hole right in the middle of the crossover frequency (which is around 2kHz I believe).

All that to say, I would very much expect your fool's bi-amping to sound better because it's not putting a huge hole in the middle of everything []

Correctly bi-amping would involve removing the passive crossovers completely and hooking the amps directly to the drivers - one channel connects to the tweeter and the other channel connects to both woofers.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Klipsch puts EQ inside their passive crossovers - which means your active crossover will at the very least need to emulate that very same EQ. But even better yet, your DSP should be able to implement far more precise EQ, which would allow you to tweak things to an even higher level of performance. Sadly, if you don't have any measuring equipment, then your only way of knowing what to do would be to have someone else measure it for you (kinda like what Roy does with the Jubilee)...or for you to spend a lot of time with recordings you know extremely well and do it by ear (doing it by ear is almost impossible).

If you lived nearby you would probably be able to persuade me to swing by with my measurement rig, but I'm kinda busy with school at the moment...I could help ya out with measuring it for yourself though - it's only about a $150 investment. Or maybe we could make a little mini-seminar out of it for cheesefest? Is that happening again this year?

[SWL]

Thanks, Mike. I forgot one thing.............this is important.[]

My preamp (Denon 3805) for this particular system has a built in eq that can be manually adjusted. I'm telling you, the ability to use the eq in the reciever and the active crossover really gives me the sound that I want............What do you make of this??? And just to be clear..........is what I'm doing considered a bad thing.............or is this something that's not really hurting anything?

[DrWho]

I doubt you're gonna hurt anything - you've still got the passive crossover in there that will let you send all sorts of signals to the speaker without damage []

As far as additional EQ in the Denon....just keep in mind that extra filters introduce distortions unless the filters are minimum phase and bring the speaker back to a flat frequency response - in which case they actually reduce distortion.

[SWL]

Thanks again, Mike. A cheesefest mini-seminar would be cool.[]