Miltiple amps for stereo Matrix 801's

The Y adapters are a great idea. What if I used four Bryston Powerpacs, two 300's for the woofers and two 120's for the heads?

If I mounted these to the back or bottom of each speaker it would keep the cable runs short.

The gain difference of the amps would be my primary concern, how would I figure that out? I guess I could could use four 300's to make things easier, but I don't need that kind of power to the heads.

Or I could do two 7B-SST2's @ 600W per. Would that be better than trying to bi-amp each speaker?

Worldwide,

The two Bryston Powerpac models you mentioned fortunately have the same gain, either 23 or 29 db for their balanced input, as selected by a rear panel switch. That is indicated on page 8 of the manual.

I should have stated more explicitly that the reference to low capacitance cables and/or short cable lengths referred to the interconnects between preamp and amps, not to the speaker cables. The reason for that is that the sum of the capacitances of the two interconnects that are branched off via the y-adapter will form an RC low pass filter in conjunction with the preamp output impedance. The same thing occurs with any preamp to amp connection, but it becomes more critical using the y-adapter and two sets of cables because the capacitances of the two cables sum together, with respect to that effect.

What preamp will you be using? The lower its output impedance, the greater the cable length, and the cable capacitance per unit length, that can be tolerated. As a rough rule of thumb, with most cables and most preamps up to 10 or 15 feet would be ok.

Re bi-amping vs. using two higher powered monoblocks non-biamped, I can't say. Perhaps someone else who has experimented with biamping the Matrix 801's will comment.

Good luck!
-- Al

I plan on using the new Wyred4Sound Dac2 with volume control. It uses the newest Dac chips from ESS so I think it's as good as any other high-end Dac.

The xover point (380 Hz?) makes passive biamping difficult. However, if you're determined, consider a "pro" amp like a Carver ZR1600 for the bass, which has variable gain. Then again, you could just get a capable amp to start with.