Help with vertical Bi-Amping


I have a Proton AA2120 Dual Mono amp, I really like its looks, and I like having meters on it, but I doubt I may ever come across another one, and I want to Bi-Amp my Teledyne AR-9 speakers , trouble is I cant find info on Proton to know about gsin and headroom, I want to use it on the top, and get something good for driving the bass..any ideas, or is this just a plain bad idea?...thanks Chad
chadnliz
To me Vertical biamping would imply one amp for the lower (BOTTOM) freqs and another for the upper (TOP) freqs. But this is unfortunately NOT the "definition". It is not about amplifier tiering. Vertical here means one amp drives one entire speaker (top-to-bottom) frequencies and the other amp the other speaker. It is such a confusing terminology that I wish were never "invented".

This configuration has the advantage of greatest channel separation. The downfall is that both amps have to be exactly matched and they have to handle the entire band which eliminates the optimization of finding amps that work so very well for one band or the other.

In any configuration, I feel that biamping only benefits the system greatly when you have optimized the speakers about as good as you can with one amp - you have reached that limit. Putting 2 mediocre amps and a mediocre active crossover (if this is used instead of the passive crossover in the speakers), and the extra cables, etc., will only result in not as good a sound as you already have.

John

John
John is right. You are actually talking about horizontal bi-amping. if you cannot find identical amp, you will need an active crossover.
thanks guys, guess I wasnt thinkin far enough outside of the box, by the way how complex are active crossovers, and what all is involced with speakers, do you need to Dig inside of speakers and change the internal crossovers? thanks again Chad