Need help What monoblock power amps for bass?

Audiobb, any idea what the impedance curve of the woofer section looks like? That will play a big role with the amp that you choose! Have you talked to Alan about this? He should be able to help you on that one.

Audiobb, my experience has been that while you can get much greater volume levels by bi-amplifying, you also pay a big price- figuratively and literally! First, to do it right you have to use and electronic crossover. Good ones are expensive, and all of them behave not only as crossovers but also as filters for detail and impact. You also have to pay for another amplifier.

I have found the most convincing systems don't use electronic crossovers, instead the amplifier drives the speaker full-range. Otherwise you face prodigious integration issues, and the better your speaker is the more you will notice them. For example, its a lot easier to bi-amplify if you use the same type of amplifier for top and bottom, as far as integration is concerned. That could be tricky in your case where you have an SET on top.

At any rate I've never seen a bi-amplified system work right. I've seen them sound OK, and I am open to the idea that one day I'll hear one that is done right but until then I advise against it- if best possible sound quality is your goal.

Pryso, in many bigger setups you have a source, a preamp, some sort of interconnect for all this, the amps and the speakers.

We all need the source, the interconnections, the amps and the speakers. Some people feel the preamp is not needed (separate thread for that) but one thing is dead certain: the more building blocks in the chain, the more noise, distortion and lack of bandwidth. An electronic crossover adds quite a bit of complexity. You can always hear the reduction in transparency and other colorations they bring. In addition, drivers in a speaker often require more than just the crossover- they might need some tailoring to deal with resonance, and some may benefit by having some sort of series resistance, particularly if you are driving a high efficiency speaker with a transistor amp.

These things are usually sorted out in a passive crossover, and not so often in electronic ones unless they are set up for the specific speaker, as in the case of the Dali. But as Dali owners can tell you, its crossover is a barrier to performance that must be overcome to realize all the performance the speaker is actually capable of.

If you try to biamplify without the electronic crossover, your amplifiers will not be running efficiently at all because they will have to reproduce signals that are being absorbed by a passive crossover- kindof a messy approach.

IOW it is to your advantage to keep the system simple if you can!

Audiobb, you can use the passive crossovers in the speaker if they are designed in such a way to allow for separate amps. The problem is that while the speaker only sees the frequencies it is supposed to, the amp still has to reproduce full-range. You get a lot more power out of the system if you have an outboard active crossover to sort that out for you.

In the case of the passive crossover allowing for bi-amplification, it does seem to sound better than using an electronic crossover. A feature of our amps is that they can be monostrapped together; this always works better than running one top and one bottom, assuming that they are the same model.

A nice trick with Maggies, at least with tube amps, is keep the speaker cables short, really short, like maybe only 6 inches. I've heard that make a profound difference.