bi-wiring again

I have been reading one of the other forums dealing with bi-wiring and there seems to be a healthy difference of opinion about the merits of doing this.

I recently purchased some Paradigm Monitor 5's to use as front L/R's, very nice sounding speakers and a great value indeed. they can be b-wired, while my old speakers could not.

The front mains are currently connected directly to the 1050, set to small, and crossed at 60 Hz. The sub is connected to the LFE channel only, but also has speaker level inputs and outputs.

My thought is to bi-wire with the low frequency signal sent through the speaker level in/out of the subwoofer and then to the Paradigms. Now telling the 1050 that the front speakers are 'large' will let the sub's crossover handle the Paradigms at whatever point proves to work best, while I can then change the crossover frequency on the 1050 to something more suitable for the rear and center surrounds (which are not totally happy with the 60 Hz crossover that best suited the fronts).

One concern is whether the main benefit of bi-wiring, i.e. a cleaner signal and better response, will be negated by sending this signal through another crossover network before it gets to the crossover in the Paradigms. I think that I will just have to try it out and see what the results are but I am looking for any thoughts or insights others could offer before I give it a shot.

I am sure that ultimately the quality of the crossover in the sub will affect the quality of the signal that the woofers in the Paradigms end up receiving. The sub is home built using an Adire Audio driver (Shiva) and amp (AVA-250).

Thanks.

Curtis

Curtis, my opinion is that there will certainly be no harm in using the bi-wiring method to allow the high frequencies to bypass the sub's crossover. That is where distortion (if any added) would be the most audible.

As for 'cascading' crossovers, the way you intend to do it will not be a problem. Also, the idea of having different crossover frequency points for the mains and the rest is a good benefit. I think your idea is a good one.

Edit: Don't forget to set 'sub' to 'no sub' in bass management.

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Larry Fine
www.fineelectricco.com
My system

[This message has been edited by Larry Fine (edited June 17, 2003).]

Instead of bi-wiring your system, why not just send me the extra money and I'll hypnotize you into thinking your system sounds better. Same effect, and this way, you make me happy to boot.

Jeff

Do I detect a note of cynicism?

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Larry Fine
www.fineelectricco.com
My system

"Do I detect a note of cynicism? "

No, a symphony.

Paul

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the 1derful1

alas, no further money to be wasted as I also ascribe to the philosophy of buying more than I need, because, well you just never know when you might want an extra 50' of copper wire (...or perhaps I could use that roll of Romex that's not fully used up yet and save a few more dimes...)

anyway, Larry, thanks for your reply and for getting the point about enhancing the bass management possiblities without throwing a negative into the system. I can guarantee that whatever the cost of the wire, I will hear an improvement over what occasionally grunts out of the surrounds with things cranked up and the 1050's crossover set at 60 hz.

Curtis

No, it's a note of skepticism. To the gullible, they're often indistinguishable.

Jeff

Curtis:

As I understand it, you are attempting to work around the single sub x-over limit of the 1050 by this proposal. Is this correct? If so it is very a interesting concept for those of us with large gaps between the capabilities of our fronts and center/surrounds.

My concern, is that the only way I can understand what you are proposing will work is if your home built sub can simultaneously handle both line and and speaker level inputs and correctly sum them. Is this actually the case? How do you plan on setting the hipass x-over on your sub? For example if you have set the 1050 to xover the surrounds and center at 100hz, and you set the hipass x-over to 60. Do you expect that your fronts will get the surround signal between 60 and 100? How will you test to make sure this works?

Do you know if all subs that are capable of handling both line and speaker level inputs work this way? If so, then I would also be interested in doing this with my Velodyne which has similar connections.

Jeff: I don't understand your comments, in this case. I can understand a general feeling that biwiring is snake oil, but I don't think Curtis is doing this for the traditional reasons.

You raise some good questions, and I will contact the folks at Adire Audio to make sure that the sub will handle this setup.

I did audition a small Velo sub prior to building my current one, and I seem to recall the manual saying not to use both line and speaker level inputs at the same time (although this method was suggested to me by Outlaw tech support when I asked whether line level or speaker inputs were superior). You should check Velo's tech support because the model I auditioned was at the low end of their product line so perhaps they won't frown on this scheme with your sub.

As far as the coordination of the multiple x-overs, I don't currently have a center channel and use phantom mode for HT viewing, so I am assuming that the 1050 is already extrapolating the center channel to the mains, which will receive the full range signal.

As far as the potential missing signal from the rear surrounds (i.e. the gap between 60 and 100 in your example) - I'm not sure if the 1050 will redirect this to the mains, although I am assuming that it will (Outlaw's - any help here?). Even if this does not happen, I feel that losing some low end from the rear surrounds will be better than overdriving them as happens now.

Thanks for the replies - I had a feeling that y'all would raise some questions that I had not considered. I'll post a note when I hear from Adire about hooking up their sub-amp in this fashion.

Curtis:

I wasn't thinking that the 1050 would send the signal from 60 to 100 to the fronts. I assumed that since you had the fronts set to large that they would get a complete signal. I further assumed that setting the 1050 to 100 (my example) for the speakers set to small would result in the 1050 adding the portions of all but the front speakers below 100 with whatever LFE signal was present.

The result would be that you would feed the sub both your front signals (via the speaker level inputs) and the line in (lfe and surround from the 1050).

My question about the hi-pass being set at 60hz had to do with what the sub would do with both signals and this setting, which is what you need for your fronts. As I have thought about this a little more I see there being three possibilities (ignoring x-over curves) which I have listed in order of probability. Note: In all three cases, the sub would play the portion of the front signal under 60hz and send the fronts the portion of the speaker signal over 60.

1) The sub would drop the line in over 60hz because of the hi-pass setting. This seems to tie to my untested recollection of what happens on my velodyne when I play with the hi-pass setting.

2) In addition to the under 60hz signal from the fronts, the sub would play the entire signal from the line in.

3) The sub would play only signals under 60hz. Line in signal between 60 and 100hz would get sent over the speaker out to the fronts. However, this would be an unamplified signal and be lost.

Consequently, I see only the 2nd as having a solid benefit. Either the first or the third would result no benefit.

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

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.

73, I guess I should clarify something. I'm not an Outlaw owner, and I hope that doesn't disqualify me from posting here. I discovered this forum when it was mentioned in another. (Remote Central)

I didn't "find out" about that feature in the 1050. I am assuming (uh-oh!) that all bass-management systems do that. I can't imagine any manufacturer would have a 'no-sub' choice that just throws the LFE into the ozone.

For that matter, I am assuming that the 1050 has a no-sub option. There must be HT owners that have main speakers capable of sub-woofer performance, like mine are. I use the 'no-sub' setting, but feed my subs via a full-range line-level output.

I hope I haven't led you down the wrong path. Please let us know if I am right about my generalizations. I don't wish to mislead or spout improper information.

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Larry Fine
www.fineelectricco.com
My system

Larry:

Thank you for the feedback. I am not upset. I think your proposal was very good and I welcome your posting here. As I mentioned in the previous post I used to run my old Yamaha receivers front line outs into my Velodyne and the ran the Velodynes hipass output to my front power amp. Because the Yamaha also had pre-outs and amp-inputs I could patch the surrounds line outs to the more powerful front amps. I scrapped that setup after I got the 1050 because the manual didn't describe a way to feed the LFE to the fronts. Whats worse is I bought into the interconnection snake oil and bought a very expensive monster cable subwoofer interconnect which will be obsolete if this proposal works correctly.

Curtis: Hopefully you can find someone else, possibly Scott from Outlaw, who can confirm that the 1050 does work the way Larry described.

Yes I will try to verify w/ Outlaw. For now I am assuming (hoping) that the 1050 will perform as Larry has assumed.

Ditto on comments to Larry about postings from him or any other non-Outlaw owners being welcome (IMO). The quality of dialogue is most helpful in clarifying issues that can seem a little murky at first.

One question - how do you insert the 'quote' references from other posts within your own post. Thanks.

Curtis

Yes - Scott at Outlaw has confirmed that this setup will work as described.

So, front speakers set to large and fed through the speaker level inputs of the sub (w/ 1050 set to 'no sub') will receive all of the signal (incl. surrounds) between the x-over frequencies of the 1050 and the sub.

Now it's time to test it out.

Curtis

Easy, even adding a question mark. See the three icons above each post? The first one is the poster's profile, the second one is to edit your post, and the third is 'respond with quote'. You'll get a reply box with the post to which you want to quote.

Just delete that which you want to omit, and type your response below (or above, etc.), and if you forget some of the prior post, just scroll down outside the box; you'll see the thread's posts sans date/time, icons, etc.

By the way, if you know HTML, VB is rather similar. You can use bold, italics, etc. You can 'quote' and '/quote' more than once in a single post, too. I made my site (for what it's worth, and still in progress) with raw HTML, not with an HTML editor (like Front Page).



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Larry Fine
www.fineelectricco.com
My system

That seems easy enough. Thanks.

Curtis