Is bi amping worth it ?

@russbutton, 

Mike

This is a very interesting thread and good points have been made.  Everyone should try to understand what @russbutton posted.  Bi-amping is complicated.  I owned a pair of bi-amped Bozak Concert Grands for several years and can attest that everything he said is true for those and most traditional or older designs.  It is nevertheless true, however, that there are modern designs where sophisticated passive crossovers have been built that take all of the variables into account.  With these very sophisticated designs there would be no benefit to bi-amping.  So while it can be agreed that generally bi-amping can improve the sound of speakers, that is not always true and we should be particularly cautious of messing with newer, more sophisticated designs where that might not be so.   

Step 1: Connect the preamplifier outputs

1. Run the first pair of interconnects from the preamplifier’s Left Pre Out 1 and Right Pre Out 1 to the input jacks of the two McIntosh 601 monoblocks.
2. Run the second pair of interconnects from the preamplifier’s Left Pre Out 2and Right Pre Out 2 to the input jacks of the same two McIntosh 601 monoblocks.
   This will feed a full-range signal from your preamplifier to both amps for each channel, which is required for passive bi-amping. McIntosh recommends using balanced connections if possible for the best performance. 

• this won’t work ? 

This looks like an AI hallucination.

@russbutton  

I read in your comment above with your sentence included below and I wish I was smart enough to fully understand what it means. It’s a very important statement and wondered if you could explain the relationships of the amounts you’re including here.  Thank you

Passive crossovers built into speakers would seem to conflict with biamp efforts when crossover Control devices are added between the speaker and the amplifier when biamping is done.  Unfortunately most speakers are not stripped of crossovers built-in to speakers before people biamp.  I like biamping because it results in dedicated signals going into each Area of the speaker as well as dedicated power supplies and that’s a big step forward in my opinion.

”its 4 ohms at about 1200 hz, but at 600 hz, has an impedance of nearly 10 ohms”.

@emergingsoul  The chart attached to my post shows the impedence of the tweeter I reference, which is the bottom curve you see there.   When people design a passive crossover, they assume that the impedence is constant over all frequencies, but that is not at all true as you can see from the curve on the chart.  

A passive crossover is an electronic circuit which is a filter.  It is assumed that all of the various components - resistors, inductors and capacitors, all have the same values at all frequencies.  The problem is that the loudspeaker driver is also a component in that circuit and it does NOT have the same impedence at all frequencies.  What makes things even worse is that capacitors do change in value as they age, so an old crossover may not operate exactly as intended when it is 25 years old.