Bi amping the Statement monitors.

[Silver1omo]

When I built my Statement monitors I separated the XO in 2 boards, 1 with the mid and 1 with the woofer and tweeter. I was thinking to re do the XO to be able to bi amp. Do you think this is a good idea?

[Coconutout]

i tried that with my monitors on a sansui 909 woofer+ el84 SET on mid+tweet. I... did not like the sound.

[cjd]

There are two reasons you might find this beneficial:

1. You want to put dramatically different amps on the mid/tweet to provide additional coloration to the sound (say, a SET)

2. You don't have amplification capable of delivering the current desired by the woofers and maintaining detail - which means you're not just using 4 channels of the same amp (power supply would be the limit in this case.)

In the first case, to each their own. In the second, the Statements deserve at least a decent amp. And while psycho-acoustics suggest you would hear a difference if you bi-wire even with 4 channels of the same amp, it's likely it's only your imagination, assuming everything else stays exactly unchanged.

[BeerParty]

When I built my Statement monitors I separated the XO in 2 boards, 1 with the mid and 1 with the woofer and tweeter. I was thinking to re do the XO to be able to bi amp. Do you think this is a good idea?

What are you using for an amplifier?

[Silver1omo]

I have an Onkyo TX-NR708 and currently I only use 4 channels (fronts and surrounds).

[BeerParty]

I have an Onkyo TX-NR708 and currently I only use 4 channels (fronts and surrounds).

The TX-NR708 should have plenty of power for the Statement Monitors. Why do you want to bi-amp them? It is impossible to say whether it is a good idea to bi-amp them without knowing why you want to do it.

[Generic George]

Passive bi-amping accomplishes almost exactly nothing and can actually be somewhat detrimental.

As long as you are still using a passive crossover, you are still going to be generating and amplifying frequencies that the crossover will then filter out. It has to for the same reason you have crossovers in the first place.

If you go to an active crossover, like the mini-dsp. Biamping or multi-amping (since you can potentially be using one amp channel per driver in the speaker), then does make a difference because you will only be amplifying and sending to the drivers those frequencies you want them to reproduce. So you are not wasting most of your power.

Then there's the issue of the fact that with multi-channel amp designs, you generally have more power available the fewer channels that are in use. So if you are using two channels, you may be reducing the power available to your woofers/mids, while supplying the tweeter with much more power than needed. The Fountek used in the statements can only handle a max power of 40 w and should receive only 17w for extended period of time.

Most of the claims for bi-amping basically fall in the the same category as claims for cables and speaker wire. Ie. magic with no basis in reality.

[Silver1omo]

The TX-NR708 should have plenty of power for the Statement Monitors. Why do you want to bi-amp them? It is impossible to say whether it is a good idea to bi-amp them without knowing why you want to do it.

They do sound great and can go louder than I need/want. 1 reason is to see if I "see" a difference, but wanted to ask as I don't want to risk damaging the caps just for a silly experiment

[BeerParty]

They do sound great and can go louder than I need/want. 1 reason is to see if I "see" a difference, but wanted to ask as I don't want to risk damaging the caps just for a silly experiment

Ah, a 'silly experiment'. I don't know if I would call that a good reason, but it certainly isn't a bad one. I built 9 cabinets (4 different configurations) and 7 crossovers for the AviaTrix just to experiment, so I am certainly familiar with desire to experiment. As long as your willing to put the effort in, I say go for it!

It would certainly be interesting to hear your results.