Having an quality active crossover allows you more felxibility to control how your signal can be splited. You can split signals in various ways to assure precise sound by using the optimal frequency range of each driver in your loudspeaker. It also governs your sound quality sometimes even your dynamic range.

Talking about bi-amping, there are also lots ways and combinations you can use to split your signal by using external Xover. The choice is yours, really, for example.

You can do it in stereo, full-range, 2-Way bi-amping. You split the signal into 2 frequency bands per stereo side ( High and low without mid ). It costs you four amplifier channels; two for the tweeter and the other two for the woofer. This is probably mostly used and very cost effective. Since it is full range, therefore no subwoofer needed. However, you have to use speakers that are really capable of "full-range"

You can do it in stereo, 2-Way bi-amping, plus mono-subwoofer. You split the signal into 2 frequency bands per stereo side ( High and low without mid ). In this mode, the low bass is summed out to the subwoofer. You use 2 amplifier channels to push high and low and another bridged mono amp to push the subwoofer for low bass. It is very similar to the bass management style found in home theater who use satillite speaker.

You can do it in stereo, full-range, 3-Way bi-amping. You split your full-range signal into three frequency bands per stereo side ( High, Mid, and Low )and use 4 amp channels to push the speakers. Two amplifier channels for High and Mid and the other two for low woofer. It sounds great, better than the 2-way bi-amping.

You can do it in stereo, full-range, 3-Way tri-amping. You split your full-range signal into three frequency bands per stereo side ( High, Mid, and low ) and use 6 amp channels to push the speakers. It is very popular these days for large spaces and it greatly reduced intermodulation distortion, but not very cost effective.

You can even go futher to run it in stereo, full-range, 5-Way fifth-amping, plus 1 mono subwoofers. You split your full-range signal into 5 frequency bands per stereo side ( High, High-mid, Mid, Low-mid, and low ) and use 10 amp channels to push the speakers. And then use 1 bridged mono amp to push another additional mono subwoofer. Nice.



[This message has been edited by theendofday (edited May 14, 2004).]