Bi-amping + speaker crossovers = redundant?

It certainly is possible but unless the speakers are two way then you will still need to leave part of the crossover in place.

Any decent external active crossover will also have volume control for the outputs so you can match everything up. Once you get that set you can change the volume with your preamp as normal.

Here is a link with a lot more info on biamping:

http://sound.westhost.com/bi-amp.htm

Mark

My speakers are two-way. My idea was to connect one integrated amplifier to the tweeters, and another one (more powerful) to the woofers. The article about bi-amping (thanks for the link!) does not seem to address such a possibility, hence my confusion.

I second Stan's comments. You need to keep the low frequencies out of the tweeters, or you will destroy them. You need to keep the high frequencies out of the woofers, or (at best) you'll mess up the frequency response in the crossover region. Tone controls on the integrated amps are unlikely to accomplish these things adequately. And at best you'll wind up with a very crude approximation of what the speaker designer intended his crossover network to accomplish, which will undoubtedly sound poor. There is also the practical issue of having two separate volume controls, as Stan mentioned.

Finally, to the extent that low frequencies are not kept out of the power amplifier section of the integrated amp that feeds the tweeters, using a more powerful amp on the woofers will be pointless. How loud you can turn up the volume will be limited by the clipping point of the lower powered amp, if the lower powered amp is allowed to see most or all of the bass content of the signal.

Oftentimes simpler is better!

Regards,
-- Al

If you send the full range signal to the tweeters with tone controls setting the bass as low as it goes...you will blow your tweeters. No question, don't do it. Tweeters just cant move that much (excursion).

Proper biamping does NOT send the full range signal to the tweeter or the woofers. What is done is the signal is filtered at the line level before amplification, which in theory should cause much less distortion than filtering the amplified signal.

There are commercial external crossovers for this exact purpose. I am using the now discontinued NHT X2 crossover to biamp my speakers. It is a good piece but would not be suitable for this application since it is really designed for biamping speakers with built in subs and only has low pass and high pass filters up to about 200 hz.

One solution would be to use Harrison Labs PFMOD in line crossovers. These plug in between the amp and preamp and will provide the high and low pass filtering necessary.

Waryn - do you know what the crossover frequency is of your speakers?

Biamping can be done with integrated amps but you will need the "master" amp (meaning the one you want to use to control volume) to have seperate pre outs to connect to the other amp.

The amp that you use on the tweeter needs to have no DC offset or turn on "thump" or you will kill the tweeter in a hurry since there is now no capacitor to protect it from DC.

Hope this helps - it is a little complicated but certainly doable.

Mark