Is it best to use a 5-channel amp for biamping??

I meant could he split the signal and use 2 channels to drive a single speaker in bi-amp fashion, sorry.

If a speaker requires that all four binding posts be hooked up in order for all of the drivers to operate properly, one can passively bi-amp with out a problem. There is one hitch to this though...

If the speakers are improperly wired internally AND someone is using two different amps to run their speakers, you could run into big problems.

The reason that i mention this is that this is the exact situation that we ran into with my Father's speakers when we pulled them apart. The lower midrange driver was "cross-wired". In other words, the positive of the midrange was connected to the "high end" binding posts and the negative of the midrange was connected to the "low end" binding posts. Luckily, my Father never tried bi-amping his speakers.

What this would have done is tied the output stages of each amp together electrically. Depending on the design of the amps and the voltages involved, this could result in "smoke". While this was obviously a mistake from the factory, it would have been a costly one for the consumer. In such a situation, i can picture someone standing there with one wire in each hand and blackened soot all over their face saying "what the hell happened???".

In this type of situation, i sincerely doubt that the manufacturer of the speakers wouldn't have stood behind their mistake and paid for the repair of one or both amps. The really bad part is that someone might have the amps repaired and not realize that it was a problem with the speakers, possibly repeating such a disaster.

As such, i would suggest connecting just the high frequency section of the speakers in normal fashion and make sure that all the drivers work as they should. When your sure that this works fine, connect the low frequency section and make sure that all of the drivers used in that frequency range are working okay. Once you've done that, hook the positive to the high end section and the negative to the low end section. You should have silence. If it is silent, connect the negative to the high end section and the positive to the low end section. That too should be silent. If you get sound out of either of these "non-standard" wiring configurations, the speaker has internal wiring problems or is not a "true" bi-wire / bi-amp capable design. Sean
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but you can bi-amp off the different channels of a multi-channel, assuming what you described as a possible issue does not exist?

Thanks everyone for your response. I think Arthursmuck understand what I am trying to do. I am sorry I did not mention what speakers I want to biamp. I have the ML SL3, which are design for bi-amping.

I am trying to decide which Sunfire amp I should get:
The 5-channel cinema grand or the 300W two channel.

It seems to me that I might get more out of my SL3 if I use the 4 channels of the Sunfire cinema grand in a bi-amp configuration (two channels per speaker). Has anyone use a 5-channel amp to biamping this way?

Thanks

I hate to say that anything is an absolute as there are almost always exceptions to every rule. With that in mind, it would be pretty safe to assume that you should be "okay" even with goofy internal wiring in the speaker so long as you were running multiple channels from the same amp. There are some amp designs that i can think of this causing problems with, but none of the multi-channels that i know of use this approach.

As a side note, i did this for a while when the two channel amp that i use for the mains in my HT system was sent back to the manufacturer for inspection and upgrades. I had another 5 channel amp that i wasn't using, so i ran four of its' channels to passively bi-amp the mains with. Since it was from the same manufacturer, there wasn't a drastic change in sonics either way. Sean
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