Now that the 7075 has been out awhile, how are the owners liking them?

Well built, stays mildly warm, little ventilation needed. Power - more than enough for most applications. I did use it for some M80's and it sounded ok. But when I used an ATI 1202, they came alive. It would seem the more power fed to M80's the better they sounded. But back to the 7075. As I mentioned, more than enough power for the rest of my speakers (Axiom), I do not know if the speakers, processor or amp is responsible for the following, when listening to familiar music, it is kinda neat to hear "new things". With movies, the dialogue is clear and sound effects great. My room is an odd shape, the surrounds get enough power so that I can hear them. It was not so distinct using a reciever. It is not that easy to get it shipped here (GST/PST and a fee to tell you it is "duty Free"). I know that if I got that "bug" again, this would be an easy sell - but why would I want to sell it when I could just move to another room. I am not that technical, but I am very happy with this amp that I originally used for all 7 channels, but now for five. Customer service was very good when I could not figure out the 12 v trigger and using with the Belkin PF 60. Right now, for Canadians, it is a good time to buy.

chas,
My father upgraded from the 1050 to the 990/7075 combo driving paradigm monitor 7 and LMF-1+ handling the low end.
Sounds really nice: on DVD, SACD, and using ITunes radio stream.

Pops is into 2-channel and some movies. Ratio 75/25.
System has been running since thansgiving. I heard it over Xmas for 5 day's. Family is into music/movies so we ran it thru all day events. Very nice setup.
The 7075 could be driven to loud levels and maintain width and not get compressed.

2-channel sounds impressive. i would give it 2 thumbs up.
The amp would be cool to bi-amp mid-smaller towers and/or book shelf speakers in a 5.1 system or 2-channel.

Great info guys..thanks for the feedback.

How do you biamp using these...split the signal from one preout to two amp channels?

Chas,
yes, you will have to split the pre-outs to create 2 outputs from the left and right.
Then feed individual channels into the 7075. Then run 2 speaker cables per channel to the left and right.

This will work if you have speakers that can be by-wired or by-amped.

Have fun.....

Thanks again. Any thoughts on how your 7125 compares to the 7075?

All Outlaw multichannel amplifiers use what is essentially the same circuit. The only difference is power output, and of course a larger power supply to supply the current.

Chas and tmdip, I thought biwiring was different from (and theoretically inferior to) biamping. Biwiring as I understand it doesn't require two amplifiers per channel, jut separate tweeter and woofer connections on each speaker - but both feeding the speaker's internal crossover circuitry - so the high-pass filter (attached to the tweeter) can be fed by a different wire or cable from the one feeding the low-pass filter (attached to the woofer). But both cables can perfectly well fed by the same amplifier. Of course for biwiring the external jumper joining the tweeter and woofer binding posts, or whatever, has to be removed. The theoretical advantage is less interaction between the treble and bass signals in the cables. I run my Magneplanar 1.6s that way and I think they sound a tad cleaner, but I can't prove it.
Biamping on the other hand, at least real biamping, requires feeding the preamp's signal, via just one set of interconnects, to an external, line-level crossover network, and any such units good enough for high musical quality aren't cheap. (If anybody knows of good ones costing less than $500 could they tell me?) The crossover has treble and bass line-level outputs that feed separate power amplifiers, or separate sections of the same multichannel power amp, and the cables from those amps go direct to the speakers: no speaker internal crossover. Obviously this can't be done unless the speaker's own crossover circuitry can be removed or at least bypassed. In the Magneplanar line the two top speakers, the 20.1 ($14,000) and the 3.6R (a mere $4800) can be run this way (their manuals even tell how to set the external crossovers) but not my 1.6QRs. The advantage, which is probably more audible, is that intermodulation distortion in the power amp is virtually eliminated and the speakers are driven directly by the amplifier, without any intervening circuitry.
The financial benefit of biamping is that you can have a very high quality 5-channel system, with the left and right mains biamped, using a 7-channel amplifier - and the 7075 would have plenty of power for just about any installation short of literal theater size. The cost, of course, is that line-level crossover - but the cost difference between the 7075 and bigger 7-channel amps might cover that.
But you gotta have biampable speakers.

Slight name correction: line-level crossovers are more often called active crossovers, while the circuits in speakers are passive crossovers.

A truly active crossover system will exhibit a much more obvious improvement in sound than either passive bi-amping or bi-wiring. Passive bi-amping has at least _some_ bit of justification in electronic theory, that being load sharing and a bit of isolation, but honestly, the effect of the passive crossover still being in series with the drivers nulls out essentially any benefit that this connection may have.

Bi-wiring is useless, assuming that your speaker cables are of sufficient size in the first place. Speaker companies like to tout their speakers as being bi-wire ready since this makes them seem more "high end", and obviously speaker cable companies like it too. But it's just marketing.

Altec,
I hear you (no pun intend) on the theory .... but there have been speakers wher i could hear a difference.
A while back, working part time in hi-fi store, i walked out of a listen session and walked back in after getting a diet coke.
I did not know that the guys in the room where going to play around.
when i came back in the same music was playing again and it sounded a little different. I thought they moved the speakers or where playing w/ room treatments....
They told me they switched to bi-wire.
It really did not make sense electrically ... but it did sound a little cleaner or slightly more open....

Just a life example.....

But i appreciate the input from you and psyprof1... thanks

Thanks for the technical clarifications. I suppose "passive bi-amping" is the correct term for what we were talking about? I have done this with receivers using the 6th and 7th channels to "passively bi-amp" the mains but never noticed much of a difference.

Whenever there is a question of whether there truly is a change, a double blind test is the only way to really sort out the truth. To properly do this in the situation you mentioned, you would have the person switch (or not switch) the configuration back and forth with you staying exactly in the same place, and without you knowing the configuration you are hearing. Score would be kept of correct identifications. Anything less than 80% correct identifications is questionable - 50% is what you would get by just flipping a coin.

The human ear is as easily fooled as the eye (ever seen an optical illusion?) and our acoustic memory is generally bad. Also, what you heard just recently (or silence) dramatically influences what you hear a minute later. A speaker for instance will sound slightly different to your ear if the thing you heard 5 minutes before was a truck verses silence, or another speaker. Also, if you drunk or ate something either hot or cold at that refridgerator, this will greatly change your hearing perception for several minutes afterward.

Personally, I've had probably thousands of instances where I think I've heard a dramatic (or slight) change from one day or minute to the next, especially after I've changed something in a system. More often than not when I've checked myself by having somebody change the system back to original and to the new configuration without me knowing which is which, I've been unable to reliably tell any difference.

Yes, passive bi-amping is what it is called when you use two identical amplifiers running the same signal in parallel, one amp feeding the HF and one the LF section of a speaker.

Active bi-amping is when the preamp line signal is fed to the input of an electronic crossover. The HF and LF portions of this crossover then feeds the inputs of two amplifiers, which then drive the speaker drivers directly with no passive crossover components in between.

I run my system with active bi-amping with a 24dB per octave Linkwitz-Riley type crossover at 500Hz. One huge advantage of active crossovers is that the two amplifiers need not be identical. You can run for instance a solid state amplifier for the woofer and a sweet sounding tube amplifier for the tweeter.

One last point (from here anyway) on biamping is that any system that sends the bass below a set frequency, e.g. 50 Hz, to active subwoofers is technically a biamped system - it's just that the two frequency bands are low bass and everything else. So lots of you are biamping right now. But if it's a mono subwoofer I guess it's just one-and-a-half-amping.

Regardless, there is still a passive crossover inside the main speakers in any configuration other than using active crossovers in a "traditional" system with a powered sub. The passive crossover is the main culprit in degrading the performance of a speaker. It's a resistive / inductive reactance / capacitive reactance mess actually.

Very good point which I forgot, and a good reason for active biamping, if you can just bypass the passive crossover built into the speaker. My Maggie 1.6's are now out of warranty and I'm almost tempted to try it, if somebody could just point me toward a high-quality active crossover for less than $500.
Get rid of performance-degrading culprits! Sounds almost like a political slogan.

Unfortunately, there are essentially no good ready built electronic crossovers on the market for anywhere near $500 or below.

Your only real option, and a very good one at that, is to build one such as this one from Elliot Sound Products, where you can use the Op-Amps, resistors and capacitors of your choice.

24dB Linkwitz-Riley Active Crossover

There are some on the market in your price range, such as one from Behringer , which is an all digital unit, but I'd steer away from these at all costs. For starters, being digital, all analog signals are converted to digital for processing, then converted back to analog. The problem is the question of how good could these converters be for the asking price of the crossover? Not very good, I'd say. Also an unnecessary digital conversion cycle is an extremely high, and totally unacceptable in my view, price to pay for a simple thing like implementing an active crossover.

Behringer also has a couple models which I believe are analog, depending on whether one is attempting to bi-amp or tri-amp:

http://www.behringer.com/CX2310/index.cfm

http://www.behringer.com/CX3400/index.cfm

I have no idea if the quality of these crossovers for critical listening. They are in common use for sound support and don’t exhibit the same issues as some users have pointed out in the digital-based DCX-2496. Sometimes used CX3400 and CX2310 show up occasionally on the classified and auction web sites at pretty good prices.

I plan to experiment with a CX3400 for tri-amp use. If the concept works well, but the CX3400 sound quality isn’t quite as good as I was looking for, then a DIY circuit may be in order. The CX3400 has variable crossover points. If I change to a DIY circuit, I will have already established the target crossover points for a particular set of drivers in an enclosure.

While I don’t like unnecessary A/D/A conversions, if I’ve read the literature correctly, beyond just crossover use, the DCX-2496 has some limited additional functions that would allow a user to EQ a set of speakers for a specific room without the need for a separate unit that might use A/D/A conversion anyway. If I were going through an A/D/A process for the sake of some EQ, I might as well perform crossover functions while I’m at it. Behringer claims that the DCX-2496 uses the ‘ultra-high resolution CRYSTAL®/AKM® A/D & D/A converter’, which I know nothing specific about.

Similar to my planned use of a CX-3400, if one used a DCX-2496 during experimentation and evaluation and learned what kind of crossover points and voicing work well with your speakers in your environment, then that would establish a target for an all-analog DIY circuit build.

I highly recommend the site Altec mentions, Elliot Sound Products , and additionally Linkwitz Lab .

If you are the type that likes to learn about these things, good reading and references:

http://sound.westhost.com/articles.htm (two-thirds of the way down the page is a section of eight articles on crossovers and filters)

http://www.linkwitzlab.com/filters.htm

http://www.linkwitzlab.com/links.htm

Behringer uses surface mount technology for it's products, which are banged out in mass quantities in China. It is extremely difficult, and impossible for the prices Behringer charges, to get high quality capacitors for use in analog-only crossovers. In a crossover, the quality of the capacitors is EVERYTHING.

I know there is tremendous temptation to use the digital crossover because of it's other "features" and price, but I would never make that tradeoff. Consider this - would a record company use the cheap digital converters in the typical Behringer product to master your CDs? I think not.

My advise for anybody interested in sound quality is to not go there, at all.

Even if not suited for ongoing use, are these products not valuable as a tool?

When someone builds a DIY crossover/filter arrangment, usually the resistor/capacitor values will be fixed - and one has to decide if any filtering will be needed in addition to the basic crossover functions. Because of their flexibility, using one of the Behringer products for an evaluation of choices may be useful. Once one has made the determination, 'this is what I want the active electronics to do', then a DIY circuit can be the next step.

Of course, if you are replacing a passive crossover network with an active crossover, and you already know the target crossover points and voicing needed, you may not need an 'experimental platform', both with regard to active electronics or acoustical measurement.

I guess is somebody has the money, then using the Behringer as an "evaluation tool" might make sense. It seems though to me to be an answer to a question nobody asked, since in most cases, the crossover frequency is a known value, and any tweaking is best done by an external analog EQ in any event.