What do you gain from bi-amping Magnepan 1.6s or


OK, I am going to sound naive but I admit I am - simply trying to gain knowledge.
Does bi-amping mean you use one amp for each speaker and if so why? I guess this is what mono-blocks are for and I thought it was a simple case of wiring one amp to one speaker but I read a post on here where a guy was asking if it was possible to bi-amp Magnepan 1-6s and the answers seemed very technical (issues relating to crossovers etc). Anyway, I have a pair of 1.6s and I have use of Parasound JC1s but don't want to damage anything. If I decided to how would I go about this and what have I got to gain. I currently run the 1.6s with a Pass 250.5.
thomastrouble

Showing 1 response by timrhu

Having recently tried bi-amping for the first time, with excellent results I must say, I'll take a crack at this.
Although the link Rodman provides is excellent, it is a lot of reading. So here's a beginners explanation. Bi-amping provides one amplifier channel per set of terminals on your speakers. The 1.6 has terminals for high and low frequencies so bi-amping them requires 4 channels of amplification. You could use 4 monoblocs, 2 stereo amps or a single 4 channel amp to get one channel per speaker driver.
Also, you would need to split the output from your preamp to provide an input to each of the channels. In my case, the amps (PS Audio) have a switch on the back to route the input to both channels. Some amps have a line input and output to provide chaining the amps together for bi-amping. Linn and Musical Fidelity are two that come to mind.
I won't address inserting filters as I did not do it that way. I ran each amp full range and let the speakers crossover provide the filtering. Just to be clear on that, your speakers provide filtering (crossover) to ensure only the desired frequencies reach each driver. The crossover is basically 2 filters that keep the drivers from reproducing frequencies they are not intended to produce.
I hope this helps.