biamping and curent


I am looking for help understanding different biamp options and how they affect current and power, If my speakers are 6 ohm, I understand that with biamping, they are 3 ohm. Is this a problem for the amps? Also what about cable configuration? What is optimum? Do I need two sets of cables? Can I do it with a single biwire?
blbloom

Showing 1 response by bsassc7c4

Taken at face value, your message implies a misunderstanding of biamplification. Biamping a system means that you are providing separate power amplifiers to drive your woofers and your mid/high drivers in your speaker system. Essentially you have a power amplifier connected directly to the speaker instead of going through a crossover. My first biamped system used a crossover that was connected to my pre-amp outputs, and the crossover had separate outputs for bass and treble which connected to the inputs of the two amplifiers which drove each stereo channel. My current system uses B&W Nautilus 801 speakers which have internal crossovers and per the manufacturers instructions, I am not using an external crossover. My preamp has two outputs and I run two sets of cables from my preamp to my power amps. So to shorten things and answer your specific questions, you are splitting up your speakers somehow into high and low frequency units, and this will affect the impedance of the speakers, but you really would need to put a meter across the terminals of each input (low and high frequency) to really know what they are because the differing drivers probably have different impedances. As to causing a problem with your amps, that depends on the specific amp and how it can handle the required impedance for that low or high frequency driver. You need two sets of speaker cables per channel and while biwire could possibly work, it probably would be a problem because it would need to split out to 2 separate amplifiers at one end, and two speaker inputs at the other. Separate cabling is more convenient. One last thing--just because your speaker cabinet has two sets of inputs (as for biwiring), that doesn't necessarily mean that those inputs are completely separate internally. There could be a shared ground in the crossover, for example. You should ensure that the two sets of speaker inputs are completely separate before attempting to connect separate amplifiers to them, as this could result in a bad thing._Bill