McIntosh MC901's internal active crossover & speaker's internal passive crossover


hi all,
There are two sets of crossovers in a single system.  What do you think?  good or bad? why or why not?

To maximize the performance of MC901, do I need to disconnect speakers' internal passive crossover from the bass, mid range and tweeter units?

thank you!

believer

@cleeds 

What exacy do you think a speaker made for bi wiring does?  What do you think happens when you remove the external jumpers?

A biwirable speaker provides a separate path for lo and hi frequencies, but they are still joined electrically at the xover. A biamplified speaker provides electrically isolated paths for the two frequency bands. That's the difference between the two.

A biwirable speaker provides a separate path for lo and hi frequencies, but they are still joined electrically at the xover.

@cleeds 

Would you post some example what make and model of speakers that is bi-wirable but not bi-ampable?

TIA

A biwirable speaker provides a separate path for lo and hi frequencies, but they are still joined electrically at the xover.

 

@Cleeds In my experience that’s’ almost never the case, but I have seen it happen. Almost all speakers I’ve seen with 2 sets of inputs and external jumpers separate the crossovers internally.  Otherwise, why have jumpers??

You can easily check this in a couple of ways. Remove the jumpers and plug in the woofers. See if anything comes out of the tweeter.

Next, do an impedance check between hot to hot and ground to ground. Should be infinite.

The one case I remember being posted about the speaker only had ground shorted internally. Normally this would be OK unless your amp was fully balanced.

 

Almost all speakers I’ve seen with 2 sets of inputs and external jumpers separate the crossovers internally.  Otherwise, why have jumpers??

Agreed, biwiring doesn't make much sense and neither do the jumpers. When you biwire, you do not send the full amplifier output to the tweeter, do you? Of course not, you'd blow the bugger out. It still goes through the speaker's x-over. It's easy to verify with a DMM - just check for continuity. Spendors used to be wired that way, IIRC, and it always puzzled me.