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Author Topic: Bi Amping speakers  (Read 13997 times)

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Offline Church-Audio

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Re: Bi Amping speakers
« Reply #15 on: July 09, 2012, 09:31:25 PM »
I run two runs of 9ga. cable to each speaker; Analysis-Plus Bi-Oval9's copper.
I use coat hangers lol :)
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mfrench

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Re: Bi Amping speakers
« Reply #16 on: July 09, 2012, 09:41:53 PM »
If thats what it takes to get the results that you're after, then go for it.

mfrench

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Re: Bi Amping speakers
« Reply #17 on: July 09, 2012, 10:33:03 PM »
Questions for you, Chris.
Do you remove the clear varnish coating from the metal coat hangers?
If so: Does the rust on your coat hangers have an effect on the sound?
Do you use this system to voice your products?

Offline Church-Audio

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Re: Bi Amping speakers
« Reply #18 on: July 09, 2012, 10:38:22 PM »
Questions for you, Chris.
Do you remove the clear varnish coating from the metal coat hangers?
If so: Does the rust on your coat hangers have an effect on the sound?
Do you use this system to voice your products?
No man I leave the varnish on because I find the soundstage much wider. I am working on using chrome painted plastic hangers next;) and of course that's the system I use it is flat from 1k to 3.4568768k
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Offline ts

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Re: Bi Amping speakers
« Reply #19 on: July 10, 2012, 07:58:08 AM »
I think I may end up selling the two smaller amps I have and get one big sucker. Then I'll try the coat hangers. :P When I first got these speakers in 1985 I ran them with a big Adcom amp. They sounded very nice, but the owner of the shop where I bought them was always trying to get me to biamp them. He closed up in the mid 90's and these speakers have been at the in-laws since then. Now that I have them back the biamping thing caught my interest again. Found a guy on Agon that runs his with two Adcom 555's and the xover I linked earlier in the thread. Right now I'm running them on an Adcom 545 at 125 per channel. I also have a Adcom 5200 at 52 per channel that I can use for the highs. Just need a xover. But I said this already, didn't I?


mfrench

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Re: Bi Amping speakers
« Reply #20 on: July 10, 2012, 10:11:30 AM »
This forum has a bunch of ADS fans that really know these speakers. It might be worth poking around there a bit:
http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=27
I also have a pair of ADS speakers, though not big ones. I have the L10 bookshelf speakers, which are great speakers in their own right; just not large scale speakers.

Offline ts

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Re: Bi Amping speakers
« Reply #21 on: July 10, 2012, 10:28:09 AM »
Thanks Mike. I did find some good info there. It seems the ADS fans are 50/50 on biamping. These speakers love power. The more you throw at them the better they sound. Some folks feel using a larger amp gets the same results as biamping. Your biwiring idea might become a good option with a larger amp. I guess since each speaker already has two sets of posts all I need is biwire?

http://sportsbil.com/ads/l-1290_and_l-1290_ownersmanual.pdf



This forum has a bunch of ADS fans that really know these speakers. It might be worth poking around there a bit:
http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=27
I also have a pair of ADS speakers, though not big ones. I have the L10 bookshelf speakers, which are great speakers in their own right; just not large scale speakers.

Offline Gutbucket

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Re: Bi Amping speakers
« Reply #22 on: July 10, 2012, 12:17:13 PM »
These ADS are different, but many modern 2 and 3 way speakers have two sets of binding posts with a bridge between them.  Most of them retain the internal crossover network even when removing the bridge and using seperate inputs, which simply isolates the bass driver(s) and bass crossover network from the mid/tweet drivers and their network.  In that case no external crossover is requried when using two amp channels per speaker. To bypass the internal x-overs on those you need to open up the speaker and rewire things.
 
Any speakers wired like that benefit from bi-amping primarily due to the increased power reserve of using two amps.  One larger amp would pretty much do the same job.  Bi-wiring mostly decreases wire resistance by using twice as much conductor.  Either way the internal crossovers still do the frequency dividing work, regardless of whether they are connected together at the binding posts or not.  They just do it together or independantly.

Less commonly, some speakers have a provision to bypass the internal crossover network completely on 2-way speakers, or bypass a portion of it on 3-ways like these ADS which retain the internal mid/tweet internal x-over even when the lower x-over is bypassed.   I suppose there are some 3-ways with three sets of binding posts designed for external x-overs but that's rare.  I think these ADS speakers have switch on the back that bypasses the lower crossover network, and with that switch thrown you'd need an external two way stereo x-over for the woofer/mid baton handoff.

Here's a question: Is there both a switch and also removable conductor bridges between the binding posts? or simply the switch?  If there are both, you may be able to remove the conductor bridges but not throw the switch, allowing you to bi-amp with your existing amps to increase the available power, while retaining the internal crossovers.   If there is only the switch that isn't an option.  But check with the ADS forum experts and don't blow up your speakers by listening to me!


Confused yet? My current speakers are the more typical 3-ways featuring two sets of bridged binding posts which retain the internal crossovers when the bridge is removed.  I do have the L/R pair biamped, mostly because I'm using fat 4 conductor welding machine power cable as speaker cable so I have the extra conductors there already, and I've set my multi-channel amp to internally switch to L/R bi-amp mode to double up the available amp modules when listening in two channel.  If I only had one set of wires to each speaker, I could set the amp to bridge the availabe amp modules instead of bi-amping, and that would achieve basically the same thing power wise except the four modules would not be driving the woofers and the mid/tweets independantly. When switched to multichannel mode they become simply bi-wired as the extra amp modules are re-routed to other channels.


I also have a pair of ADS speakers, though not big ones. I have the L10 bookshelf speakers, which are great speakers in their own right; just not large scale speakers.

You ever find the tweeter you were looking for a few years back?  I finally cleared out the trunk I had those parts stuff stored in but no sign of 'em.

« Last Edit: July 10, 2012, 12:21:46 PM by Gutbucket »
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mfrench

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Re: Bi Amping speakers
« Reply #23 on: July 10, 2012, 01:00:12 PM »
Its the bass driver that has turned noisy. The tweets are fine.  I've found a guy that rebuilds the ADS speakers in Az., but, I'm thinking of just getting a set of replacement bass speakers from Orange County Speakers supply house and replacing them both at once. He was supposedly on the design team originally.   
The guy from Az. wants a very pretty penny to overhaul a single speaker. I can replace both with quality replacements for less than he wants for a single speaker. Its been fairly low priority though as they're only used in the bedroom system , which is non-existent for now.

Offline Church-Audio

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Re: Bi Amping speakers
« Reply #24 on: July 10, 2012, 01:59:41 PM »
These speakers are 90db at 1 watt at 1 meter how loud do you listen to your stereo?? Adding tons of power when you are not going to use it is a waste of money.... That's why so many guys use 25 watt tube amps because for most people thats all you need for the living room....... That being said I use 100 per channel x 7 channels for my surround system + 400 watts on my  sub. But again if I had to measure what I am actually using I bet is not over 20 watts of real power that I am using.
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mfrench

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Re: Bi Amping speakers
« Reply #25 on: July 11, 2012, 10:33:55 AM »
Thanks Mike. I did find some good info there. It seems the ADS fans are 50/50 on biamping. These speakers love power. The more you throw at them the better they sound. Some folks feel using a larger amp gets the same results as biamping. Your biwiring idea might become a good option with a larger amp. I guess since each speaker already has two sets of posts all I need is biwire?

http://sportsbil.com/ads/l-1290_and_l-1290_ownersmanual.pdf



This forum has a bunch of ADS fans that really know these speakers. It might be worth poking around there a bit:
http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=27
I also have a pair of ADS speakers, though not big ones. I have the L10 bookshelf speakers, which are great speakers in their own right; just not large scale speakers.

You can build some experimental cables from home depot bulk stock.  Get some 12ga two conductor wire from HD, and use them. example: romax 12ga. 2-wire cable, or even 12ga. lamp cord.
I'm not sure of what your amp has for outputs; so either use them as a y-pair, or, if you have two sets of outputs, use them as separate runs of cabling.  It won't cost much to do this ~$20, and you may end up liking them enough to just leave it that way.

mfrench

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Re: Bi Amping speakers
« Reply #26 on: July 11, 2012, 11:08:13 AM »
I was just working with the Romex of that gauge pulling a dedicated circuit leads, so it was fresh in my mind.  I'd use it because i have it on hand.

Offline it-goes-to-eleven

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Re: Bi Amping speakers
« Reply #27 on: July 11, 2012, 11:49:24 AM »
Watts are not watts.  I've seen "80 watt" denon amps that couldn't drive speakers as loud as a 12 watt Naim.

As far as audio quality goes, you may find driving the amp directly, or passively, produces far greater gains in audio quality than bi-amping.  Eliminating the pre-amp with my Squeezebox > DNA125 > VR4 combo resulted in a shockingly dramatic improvement in sound quality.  I sort of tried it on a lark, but subsequently found large online communities that focus on ways to do it.

Not all gear is well suited to the passive approach - it depends on the source and the amp.  The DNA125 has very high input impedance.  That allowed me to get lucky, and not need an impedance matching stage.

Offline Church-Audio

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Re: Bi Amping speakers
« Reply #28 on: July 12, 2012, 05:58:32 PM »
Watts are not watts.  I've seen "80 watt" denon amps that couldn't drive speakers as loud as a 12 watt Naim.

As far as audio quality goes, you may find driving the amp directly, or passively, produces far greater gains in audio quality than bi-amping.  Eliminating the pre-amp with my Squeezebox > DNA125 > VR4 combo resulted in a shockingly dramatic improvement in sound quality.  I sort of tried it on a lark, but subsequently found large online communities that focus on ways to do it.

Not all gear is well suited to the passive approach - it depends on the source and the amp.  The DNA125 has very high input impedance.  That allowed me to get lucky, and not need an impedance matching stage.
Most of these amps are using a multi amp IC chip with a 50v power supply at around 3 amps there is no way in hell you will ever see 100 a ch x 6 channels most of these companies use "magic watts" lol most dont talk about THD% @ Full output because they know at full output the distortion figures are really bad. Also the impedance curves of most speaker suck the big sack as well so that contributes to the distortion. You are correct watts are not watts in most cases. Thats why you dont need crazy power you just need honest power because at the end of the day most people never use more then 20 watts of real power in a living room.
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Offline ts

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Re: Bi Amping speakers
« Reply #29 on: July 13, 2012, 09:22:32 AM »
OK, I'm now thinking about Mike's suggestion and biwiring. I also have an integrated amp with 2 sets of posts for each channel and the ADS L1290's also have 2 sets of posts on each speaker.

http://sportsbil.com/ads/l-1290_and_l-1290_ownersmanual.pdf

http://www.musichallaudio.com/product_files/maven/maven.pdf

How can I do this? Remember play nice, as I am technically challenged. :P

 

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