Bi-amp Paradigm's Mon 9's (1 Viewer)

[Devin_G]

I have a pair of Mon 9's and have been running them in my home theater for about 4 years and am impressed to all lengths of how nice they sound. But my question is this:

I've been thinking of bi-amping them and am curious how you would do this if I'm only running a 5.1 JVC.

Do you need another amp?

And how would that work?

Does it matter that full bandwith is going to both top and bottom? or does the crossover in the speaker do the work on that?

Future purchase of a 7 channel amp with seperates are a possibility but for now is it feasible to do with a 5.1 set up and would it be worth it?

any knowledge on bi-amping would help, thanks!

 

[RichardHOS]

Using the passive crossovers that are in the speakers will result in little benefit when biamping.

The most rewarding approach would be to use the pre-outs of your receiver for the front channels instead of the receiver's amplifiers. Those would run into an active crossover network (which can be built DIY style for under ~$25 per channel with excellent quality), and from there directly to the drivers in your Paradigm's. You would bypass the passive crossovers completely.

Level adjustment would have to be included on the crossover outputs to match speaker sensitivity between drivers, but that is a simple thing to do.

 

[Devin_G]

I don't know if you realise this but Paradigm has the capabilites to bi-amp out side of the speaker. It has two banana plugs going into the back.

When you purchase they are daisied from red to red and black to black.

When you bi-amp them you take of the daisy's

Is this what you are talking about Richard?

My curiousity is where do you get the extra power? does it have to be another amp??? and how to get that with out having to go and get another expensive amp.

 

[RichardHOS]

I think what you are talking about are the biwire/passive-biamp setups that many speakers have. The connections on the back you refer to sound like a way of linking or unlinking the inputs to the low and hi pass crossover sections.

Biamping in that fashion would still pass the signal through the crossovers internal to the speakers, and not gain the most important benefits of active biamping.

Unfortunately, to do this properly you would need two stereo amplifiers (or a four or five channel amplifier), which means buying another amp(s) that will be external to your receiver. There isn't much you can do about that.

However, due to the way various frequencies are summed electrially, you only need an amplifier with power output per channel of 1/4 the rating of your receiver to acheive equivalent power and sound level. I.e., if your receiver is rated at 100 watts per channel (200 watts total for left and right channels), you would only need a 4 x 25 watt amplifier (100 watts total) to acheive equivalent output.

In general, when talking about a single speaker, biamping gives twice the effective power (both electrically and acoustically) per watt than a single amplifier channel. Biamping a speaker with 100w x 2 for the low/hi sections would be equivalent to using a normal (i.e., with passive crossovers) amp rated at 400 watts for that channel/speaker.

Hope that makes sense. The point being you don't need powerful amps once you start actively crossing over and biamping your speakers.