Is Bi - amping worth the trouble?

Ngjockey

“Did you expect a short story?”

uh, well, yeah, I did. At the onset. Not now, however.
Man! That’s a lot of doing… we can nix the soldering business right off.. I’m a plug and play sort these days… though not by choice. Thanks much.

Jsadurni
“I am sorry Blindjim to scare you like this, but this is what it means when somebody talks about using an active Xover to change slopes or Xover points, and bipassing the speakers XOver.”

…it will take a mite more than this info to scare me off… far more, for I’ve faced far worse.

“use a passive preamp like the EVS attenuators or the Luminous Audio preamp on the bass amp and let the tubed amp run free. The speaker xover will allow your speakers to do their job properly.”

…. So simply attenuate the bottom amp with one of these items? So come out of the preamp to “IT” AND then to the amp? OK… a gizmo and two more sets of ics…. Yikes! Though that’s the cheapest path thus far … I think.

“If you love this too much, in a couple of years you will be gutting your speakers to tear away the original Xover and hard wire....and maybe not, I wouldnt do it....I would get horns for that!!!”

…not bloody likely. Were I to survive this endeavor, you can stick a fork in me. . .. I’m done. Well save the tube rolling, isoing, and PCing…. And extra riders on the home owners.

I just got off the phone w/BAT. Had a short little chat with VK. He uses a lot of words like perhaps, maybe, it’s possible, and so forth…. Yet he is inclined to think my now ‘semi’ debunked (there’s been a spurious post mortem resurrection, albeit short lived or no), plan should either be a safe & secure one that remains bright and shiny still, or ‘perhaps’ not. Still in all, he did say just what you did apart from the passive X over makers name…. he seemed to think or indicated that an ‘inline’ (one for each outgoing IC to the SS amp), was available. Plug & play! But no idea of who made them… but thereby just pluggin into the preamp, and moving the dial… IF things weren’t homogenous. He also cast his vote for the VK 75/75SE, along the way. Naturally. I am inclined to go with BAT up top… or a VAC, or…, we’ll see., but at least 60wpc or above.

He also indicated some degree of flexibility with the use of the various speaker taps on the amp as some accommodation… but did say it would affect more than the ‘matching’ aspect, and affect the sonics to some degree.

Any hesitation I uttered was only due to expense. Not involvement. Given things always work out just the way they are supposed to…. One way or the other… I still remain 100% undaunted (almost). You might even say “I am entrenched with my upcoming effort to bi-amp”. I wouldn’t but you might.

Is there such a thing as an inline attenuator like what VK said? If so, are they worth having?

I remain deeply grateful for any and all input/experiences provided me and others herein…. Really.
Many thanks.

What Jsadurni says seems to make sense to me with the 4JRS since the mid-high box and the bass box are independent. If you can adjust for gain differences you should be able to bring the drive of SS to the bass and the strengths of tubes to the mid-high. I guess I was thinking that the DB99 essentially did this with an independently amplified woofer (I am guessing it is crossed over on its own).

This is what the 4JR manual says:

BI-AMPING THE VR-4 SERIES: If the tightest bass is desired, use a solid state amplifier on the woofer modules. If you value “image float” and liquid-sounding midrange/treble response, use a tube amplifier on the M/T’s. You will not need an outboard crossover, since the crossovers in the speakers will still continue to work. Although it is true that louder output can be obtained by high-pass filtering the tube amp, the loss of transparency is usually not worth it, and the clean volume obtainable without a high-pass crossover will be usually satisfying for anyone but a metal head.

Blindjim, you want a plug and play? Cheapest possible? Here you go, simply run your BAT on the Mid / High section.. Remove the jumpers of course on the speakers, and By a CROWN K series digital Pro power amp, it has about 1k watts per channel so you will have no problem with bass slam and transparency, and they can be found cheap on ebay and things(around 600 plus used).. Also it is digital so it runs dead quiet, No heat, tons of power for Live concerts because that is what they are used for, many people use these for subwoofer setups in real hiend theaters and 2 channel.

Now it also has Level knobs built right into it so you can adjust the gain on the amp to match up to the bass output you want without effecting the output of the Bat or anything at all for that matter.. However you will need to run a balanced cable cause they only have XLR and maybe 1/4" connectors on them. It is possible however unless your preamp has 4 volt output which it could very well be if using balanced XLR outputs on it, than you might not get full gain output of a PRO amplifier, cause most consumer products could be only 2 volt output which is half and I believe the crown will be looking for a 4 volt signal for 100% gain from it.

This is as plug and play as it gets, you just need another outlet open on the wall to plug the new amp in, and another pair of balanced cheap XLR cables, and another pair of copper 10 gauge lamp cord speaker cables... It will be damn powerfull that much is guaranteed.

Undertow -- that's actually a very good plan! Go for it, Blindjim...

We need to pull this thread together into a general concensus, because I think we all agree true-biamping is the best. Have I got this right? Short of tri-amping, the best way to biamp is to remove the bass and midrange crossovers in the speaker, dedicate the best bass amp to the low frequencies, the best mids/highs amp to the upper frequencies. Then you need to buy an active crossover with independant frequency and level adjustments, between the preamp and amps. For someone who doesn't want to spend this kind of money, nor the listening time to compare various amps, the question still remains about just how noticable bi-wiring is with two identical stereo amps. Someone called this passive bi-amping. Then you just buy another amp, just like the one you already own, plus a y-connector and duplicate pairs of short speaker and long interconnect cables. Each stereo amp can sit right next to each speaker (just the LOOK of this is worth something). No volume settings nor optimizing of amps will be necessary. I have heard the benefits of running separate speaker cables to the highs and lows, even though any electrical engineer will tell me it only my imagination. And, I can hear EVEN MORE of the same benefits, when I run different amps in the same type of bi-wire configuration. Try it... it sounds more lively, more dynamic, more detailed. Maybe its the reduced intermodulation distortion, maybe its musical karma. I don't care, it works. My technical friend tells me that whether the crossover is before the amp or after, either way it still eliminates the current at those frequencies through the amp. The amps and the wires have less frequency bandwith to contend with.