oneinthepipe -
I see that you already decided not to go that route, but since you asked, I thought I might post an answer in case someone else was considering this.
There are two basic ways to accomplish this. The first is to simply feed the preamp outputs into both amps and connect one amp to the tweeter section and one amp to the woofer section. In this case, you are still relying on the passive crossover to deal with the gain, slopes and phase. This is the easiest way to do it. HOWEVER, it will only work if both amps have the same gain. You can check with Frank to find out if your AVA amps meet this criteria (I doubt they do, but it would be worth checking. And Frank may be willing to adjust the gain of one or the other amps to meet this criteria.)
The second approach would be to go fully active. You would simply use an outboard crossover rather than the internal passive crossover and the outputs of the active crossover would feed the two (or three) amps. In this case, YOU MUST remove the passive crossovers and run wires directly from the drivers to the speaker binding posts. This will NOT work leaving the existing crossovers in place!
Going fully active is not all that difficult to do with DEQX or TacT. But with other electronic crossovers, you would have to determine the proper slopes, gain, etc. and know exactly what you are doing. Make one mistake in the setup and your ribbon tweeter will be destroyed (I know, having destroyed a few ribbon elements by feeding them lower frequencies than they can handle.)
Finally, two additional comments:
First, one advantage of going active (or bi-amping) is that you relieve a single amp from the duty of driving both the top end and deep bass. This makes a lot of sense in a 3-way design like the HT3's. It makes less sense for a typical 2-way in that the tweeter does not draw all that much power in the first place.
Lastly, my experience has been that active set-ups can do wonders with lesser drivers. But with great drivers and Dennis Murphy crossovers, you simply can't get much better than the sound quality you get from a stock passively crossed speaker. Dennis' crossovers are so good, there simply isn't much room for improvement - so don't expect it.
I hope this helps.
- Jim
