Ok, I just scored some 200's out of Audiogon. I am going to use them for my mains. which are Polk RT3000p. Should be here by Thurs. Now I have been thinking about possibly bi-amping my mains.
I currently have a B&K 7250 amp which is 200w and & 5 channel. Any thought on this idea? The main reason I bought them, we listen to music a lot more than movies, thought it was a waste to use the big amp for stereo. But then I got to thinking about bi-amping and wondering what you folks thought. [I personally think bi-wire is a waste, at least for me, I know, mine are hook3ed up that way now, couldn't tell a difference from it and the 10 gage wire I had been using.]
So any input would be appreaciated.

i own a b&k vmr-654 6x60 and b&w 601s.i had mine passive bi-amped for quite awhile and thought when i bi-amped them,the sound stage came up.i rearranged the system and didn't have cable runs long enough,so just a normal amp and cable setup,seemed like the sound stage collapsed.well,i went and bought new 'stuff' to make the bi-amp runs again.
keep in mind these are small,slightly inefficient speakers so results will vary.

my opinion:yes,i noticed a large improvement
if you did it,i'd use strictly the b&k(trim controls?) to get the final 'tweaks' on the system.

and i listen mainly to music,also

if i can get the shortcuts to work i'll put up a link 4 u

http://ubb.outlawaudio.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=3;t=000083

can't figure out why the 'url' thing won't work

About biamping. Please note I'm a newbie at 5.1 and 7.1 or any surround. I have biamped speakers for years. Why? (1) Because I can; (2) Because I have absolute better control. Now the speakers I use lend themselves to it. They are CROWN ES 224's, where the 224 means 24 electrosatic elements, and the 2 means 2 woofers in the bass. The cabinets are separate. There is a option for biamping by connecting the banana plugs accordingly. I power these biggies with CROWN DC300's of varying vintages. So with stereo I have 2 crown amps and each with 2 channels gives me 4 controls. You get the idea. One preamp right channel is Y-connected to the rights...etc.

With volume controls on the Crown amps I can change the relationship easily. I'm still using the ES224s (very transparent and clean...though old) as my main R & L. So with my 990 and 755 I don;t have the control which I had with Crown amps. However I may play with Crowns for the bass. But I gotta tell you...the living room never sounded this good. I think the pre/pro 990 and the outlaw amp beats my previous sound

ok, Thanks for the input. I looked up some more info on bi-amping and seems I will most likely be doing a passive amping. So, I may give it a shot, but my speakers are pretty efficient, so I may not hear any improvement. In that case, I'll simply go with orginal plan and use them for the mains.
I don't really plan on a 7.1 system. I have plenty of speakers for it, just the way the living room is set up, don't have the side walls for it.

I’m a person who is “sold” on the idea of active bi- or tri- amplifying. My trouble so far is not having the test equipment and environment available to carefully analyze the behavior of my loudspeakers and the time to construct a custom active crossover that would properly match the properties of my speakers. But at some point in the future, probably starting with my front three, I hope to have all the drivers connected to amplifiers without crossover capacitors, coils and resistors in between.

A lot of people take their speakers outside to test them, since at 1 meter in a wide open space, you can take pretty good measurements, if they are short in nature.

As far as the equipment. It not that expensive to get reasonable stuff. This is from another post:

The EMU-404 sound card is excellent to connect a mic to, and has 192bit sampling. Very quiet and flat. http://www.sonicstate.com/news/shownews.cfm?newsid=1766

Coupled to the Behringer EMC8000 measurement mic:
http://www.behringer.com/ECM8000/index.cfm?lang=ENG

Then add the True Audio RTA software and you are away to the races: http://www.trueaudio.com/rta_abt1.htm

By the way, these are all available for $99 bucks online.

As far as bi-tri amplifying, a number of companies build inexpensive active crossovers, like Behringer. I have had some pretty good luck with them, which are based on a 24db Linkwitz design. http://www.linkwitzlab.com/crossovers.htm

Thanks for the info, Trikos.

I think I’m going to sound like I’m whining but:

1) These days I’m using a laptop. So I’ve either got to get an external card or a box-case-based PC to house an internal card.

2) I’ve been looking at measurement microphones and for various reasons have settled on something like the Earthworks M30 or one of its variants.

3) The TrueRTA looks like a great product.

4) While yard based measuring is good in some aspects, one doesn’t want to be too close to acoustically reflective surfaces. Right now I’m an apartment dweller, meaning there is only a tiny, shared “yard,” if one could call it that.

So, I think I’ve got a ways to go, and a couple other priorities I haven’t mentioned, before I start down the road to tri-amp happiness. Nonetheless, it’s a goal I have and will reach at some point.

The Earthworks M30 is a fine mic, but I would be inclined to spend the extra money on HT equipment. My reasoning is, to get much better than the equipment I mentioned, you would need the proper test environment, which would be big bucks..

If you got the coin, go for it...

My first consideration was the ECM8000. Some research led me to conclude that the response curve of the ECM8000 falls off oddly somewhere below about 50Hz and has some inconsistencies from one ECM8000 to the next such that using the general microphone compensation curve in software like TrueRTA for the ECM8000 can give errors in some portions of the useful frequency range of more than +/-1dB. So my next thought was to buy and have a specific ECM8000 tested so that I would know the exact compensation data to enter for that microphone. In the end, however, the cost of the ECM8000 plus analysis was nearly the same as the cost of the M30. So, if I go for the M30 to begin with, I will not only have a better microphone, but it will have been tested and come with specific compensation data.

Even if coin is limited at the moment, I’m the type of person that would rather wait and save to create a test rig with an M30 rather than buy the ECM8000 (without specific compensation analysis) now and come to doubt my results and work later on. I also tend to trust equipment, if it is known to be consistent, over my own ear-brain interpretations that vary day-to-day, so I have a personal need to have great confidence in the test gear.