Does biamping w/ SS + tubes work?

Biamping with two different technologies can work well but it's a great deal of work to get the right combination. Even if you do get it right, amps work at different speeds so you can usually detect a slight blurring.

I agree with the people that told you it doesn't work well...emphasis on "well" not "work". It will work well at the outside freqs and likely not so much where they cross over. If you do go this way, choose a ss amp based on how much you like the mid/upper range as well as the bass. That will give you the best chance of messing up the "least" in the important midrange area.

I'm not a fan of passive biamping. Give some thought to going the active x/o route. You have 3 really great amps. You may find out that when you direct couple one of them to a woofer the bass may surprise you.

Another point: Are your amps up to spec? They are pretty old and if their caps are weak, they will not do bass very well. Good luck.

It usually doesn't work well, but with some careful choices and work it sometimes can. Though there are exceptions, typically I wouldn't recommend it.

Thanks a lot guys. I live in the middle of nowhere so it's hard to try a lot of different combos.

I don't know what active crossovers are or how it will help?

Would I be better to just run a SS amp to a sub, instead of biamping full ranges? Seems like the upper bass would still be soft and I'd still have integration problems.

Thanks again, your help is invaluable esp. since I am in nowhere land and it's hard to listen.

Jim

PS - I've just pulled the system out after 6 years storage, glory! But I plan to take them all in for checkup at Soundquest in El Paso.

Your last posts suggests that you might be getting in over your head if you try bi-amping with different types of amps. Though it might appear to be in contradiction to the previous advice, using a ss amp on subs and tube amps on the main speakers (if they're tube appropriate), is actually the typical arrangement.

I've been actively bi-amping my systems(tubes/SS), since 1980. Was using a modded Dahlquist DQ-LP1 crossover MOST of that time. Now using a modded TacT RCS 2.2X. Always with transmission line woofers(very fast), and mostly planars(Acoustat & Maggie). Never had any problems at crossover points, when proper slopes were applied. Always has worked well for me.

I've been biamping my Von Schweikert speakers using a pair of Double Kronzillas on the top and monoblock Spectron Musician III Mk2 amps on the bottom. The Spectrons provide a very high damping factor on the bass drivers and the Kronzillas do their SET thing on the top. I've never noticed any sense of discontinuity in between the two. I'm passively biamping them, connecting to the M/T and bass modules without any other crossovers other than those in the speakers. The only additional item needed is an attenuator inline with the higher sensitivity amp. In this case, it's the Spectron, which is good since I don't need to put anything in the signal path with the Krons. If you have a beefy solid state amp to start with, this path lets you use a lower powered tube amp for the top. Horses for courses.

Two different sound characters at the crossover point has not worked for me, but some people are more sensitive to this than others. You just have to try it.

I have also been very successful in combining solid state and tubes. Best of both worlds as far as I'm concerned. Match the output levels and let your ears decide.

My concern is that I maybe won't get as much "tube sound" overall if I only run tubes on the treble levels and SS on the bass. At least not when using small speakers where the mids comes from the bass element aswell.

Thank you all very much. My delimma is over. Rather than post further here, I'm going to start a new thread becaues it might be useful to others not interested in this thread.
Thanks, and thanks again, this is a great place and you are nice folks....

The new thread will be called: MC240 vs 8B

River,

I also looked into this a while back. I decided not to pursue, mainly because I didn't want to mess with my speakers, but always thought it was a good idea. This is a good primer: http://sound.westhost.com/bi-amp.htm#separating_sig

To do active biamping right, and assuming you want an amp for your woofers and another amp for mids/highs, you need to take out the speakers' crossover between woofer and mids/tweeter. This is the step I wasn't willing to take.

Then you also need an active crossover between preamp and amps. Rodman's RCS 2.2 is probably one of the best options, but expensive too if you just want a crossover (it does room correction too). Bryston 10-b is another cheaper option. There are also cheaper ones I now cannot recall now. Of course you can have another crossover output for the sub, so triamping in practice, but conceptually the same thing.

I think the above are the right steps to make it work well. I live overseas I cannot get crossovers like this easily, but had I been in the US I would have tried. I did try passively biamping: tube amp with gain adjustment for top, ss for woofer, Rel sub for low bass, and speakers unmodified, and didn't like it better than tubes (MC-275) for the whole bandwidth and Rel sub for low bass. So doing it cheap didn't work for me.

I hope this helps.

Thanks guys. Both reasons why I decided against it.