Bi-amping + speaker crossovers = redundant?

It certainly is possible but unless the speakers are two way then you will still need to leave part of the crossover in place.

Any decent external active crossover will also have volume control for the outputs so you can match everything up. Once you get that set you can change the volume with your preamp as normal.

Here is a link with a lot more info on biamping:

http://sound.westhost.com/bi-amp.htm

Mark

Proper biamping does NOT send the full range signal to the tweeter or the woofers. What is done is the signal is filtered at the line level before amplification, which in theory should cause much less distortion than filtering the amplified signal.

There are commercial external crossovers for this exact purpose. I am using the now discontinued NHT X2 crossover to biamp my speakers. It is a good piece but would not be suitable for this application since it is really designed for biamping speakers with built in subs and only has low pass and high pass filters up to about 200 hz.

One solution would be to use Harrison Labs PFMOD in line crossovers. These plug in between the amp and preamp and will provide the high and low pass filtering necessary.

Waryn - do you know what the crossover frequency is of your speakers?

Biamping can be done with integrated amps but you will need the "master" amp (meaning the one you want to use to control volume) to have seperate pre outs to connect to the other amp.

The amp that you use on the tweeter needs to have no DC offset or turn on "thump" or you will kill the tweeter in a hurry since there is now no capacitor to protect it from DC.

Hope this helps - it is a little complicated but certainly doable.

Mark