Granted that my reaction towards bi-wiring is often knee-jerk ( ), but even in this case, I'm not sure it's a great idea. If one part of the signal's going through a crossover and the other isn't, the quality of the result will greatly depend on the type of crossover being used.

In general, I'd recommend running the full signal through the crossover to keep everything consistent.

Trust me, I know the temptation to bi-wire. My Aerial 10Ts are bi-wirable too, and I hate leaving jacks unused. However, since the benefit is likely to be nill and the cost (both financial and in terms of having more wires laying about) would be steep.

Take care,

Jeff

Jeff: If I understand your last message and have a chance to better understand what Curtis is suggesting, you are not objecting to the signal routing to the sub so much as you are the biwiring. Would you still object if he sent the entire front signal from the 1050's to the sub? If I understand his concept it should work the same.

As I read the dialogue - it is becoming more clear that there are two issues at hand: 1) using the sub's speaker level in/out to hand off the bass management of the mains to the sub's crossover, and 2) whether bi-wiring plays any part (either positive or negative) in the scheme of things.

In retrospect, the ability of the new speakers to accept bi-wiring instigated my desire to go ahead and upgrade the quantity of copper feeding the speakers. I had also pondered the possibility of running my old front speakers through the sub (although not bi-wired), but had not gotten around to it and again the bi-wiring option kind of brought that idea back to the front, albeit with a little twist since I could now bypass the sub with the high frequency signal.

Jeff's point about sending part of the signal to the fronts through a crossover while the rest of the signal isn't seeing the same crossover is really at the heart of the bi-wiring issue. Jeff's initial skepticism about the probability of there being no audible difference is also a point well taken (hypnotic trances will be dismissed for the time being ).

73Bruin on the other hand has nailed the question with regard to bass management and whether the low-pass / high-pass gap will leave some signal in the dust as described in scenarios 1 and 3. Pending further word from Adire, I suspect scenario 1 is what will happen here (as happened with his Velo in a similar setup). The variables introduced here are where I believe there could be some audible difference (either positive or negative), so I guess I will need to experiment with different x-over frequencies on both the sub and the 1050 to find the optimum settings.

It may end up where I have to make minor adjustments when I switch between 2-channel music and DVD's, maybe not.. (part of the reason for trying this is to avoid that), anyway it will be fun to test it out. Besides, at some point all of my speakers will seamlessly integrate with the sub and each other so this will no longer be an issue - right?

thanks again everyone for the feedback.

I think that that would be better. It's less expensive, and eliminates the potential phasing changes that might be introduced.

Jeff

You guys suggesting using both speaker-level and line-level to feed the sub (or loss of 60 to 100 Hz) are forgetting something I mentioned in my previous post:

With the processor's bass-mgt set to 'no sub', the LFE output will be mute, and the LFE and signal of all channels set to 'small' will be sent to the front speaker terminals.

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Larry Fine
www.fineelectricco.com
My system

Larry:

I am not saying you are wrong, but I can't find any description of the 1050 working this way in my owners manual. Perhaps I need to reread it more carefully. If you can point us to some more specifics that would be appreciated. In either case, it would seem what you have suggested is potentially even a more elegant solution to the problem that potentially should be documented in the manual or elsewhere.

If I summarize your point then (please correct me if I have misunderstood), one would set the 1050 to no sub, set the fronts to large and set the surrounds to small at 100hz (using the prior example) and set the appropriate xover point. Per your note, this would direct the LFE signal plus the surround signals below the xover point to the fronts.

One could then take the front line or speaker outputs from the 1050 run them to the sub and then have the subs xover set at whatever point worked best with the fronts (say 60Hz) using our previous example. This would eliminate the hipass xover problems that would potentially invalidate the prior example.

In my case where I run a separate power amp for the fronts, I would use feed the subs hipass line outs into my power amp and from there go the fronts.

The only potential downside, if this works is in the case where someone was just using the 1050, they would use use the 1050's front speaker outs to feed the sub. In this case, I would assume that a much larger load is being put on the 1050's amps, which would detract from its ability to power the other channels. Is this correct?

[This message has been edited by 73Bruin (edited June 18, 2003).]

Larry

Yeah - what he said.

It wasn't so much that I forgot what you said so much as that I didn't understand the reason to set the 1050 to 'no sub'.

73Bruin - are you assuming that the sub's internal amp is being bypassed when using the speaker level inputs? My understanding is that the sub's amp is active with either line level or speaker level input so the 1050 would only be driving the mains (and surrounds) in this setup. I could be wrong about this.

Curtis

Curtis:

My sense is that the sub's amp would probably drive the sub. But frankly I don't know what happens to the main signal when you route a speaker line output through the sub.

For example, I can easily understand a situation where the sub just senses the low frequency signals contained within the speaker line signal, amplifies and plays those, while passing the entire signal on to the fronts (possibly resulting in a doubling of a portion of the base) and resulting in an extra load on the 1050.

Not being an electrical engineer, I have a harder time understanding what would seem to be the ideal scenario. In this scenario, the sub would strip the low frequency portion of the signal away from the powered signal leaving the sub and just amplify and play the low pass portion of the signal. However, in this scenario, I have no idea of the load the 1050 amp would see. This is why I described it as a potential problem.

Sorry I wasn't clearer from the beginning.

[This message has been edited by 73Bruin (edited June 19, 2003).]

73, you have it right in both of your last two posts.

The sub amp will power the sub no matter which input is used, and the main-speaker output terminals on the sub will have the lows stripped, and the receiver will only see the mains as a load, and only above the sub's X-over frequency, so all of this will decrease the load on the amp, not increase it.

The only thing to watch is that, usually, the sub will only have line-level outs when line-level ins are used, so to have the sub's X-over work for an external amp, you would need to use line-level from the receiver to the sub.

It's possible that, even with speaker-level ins, the sub could have signal on the line-level outs, but the opposite is certain to not work; the sub won't power main speakers with only line-level input.

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Larry Fine
www.fineelectricco.com
My system

Larry:

Thanks for the feedback. How did you find out that the LFE feed would to to the fronts when the 1050 was set to no sub? I still haven't been able to find this in the 1050 manual. My old Yamaha 850 receiver worked this way, but it seem like this was another function that I lost when I moved to the 1050.