[Mediapet]

Good day Vinnie

I am about to activate my Maggie 1.6 with dedicated active crossovers. I plan to have a stereo amp per loudspeaker to drive the panel. (one channel for the bass, the other channel for the mid/trebel). Would you recommend to use your stereo amp for such a set up? Is your 30 Watt amp powerfull enough to drive the M 1.6? And is it stable enough too?

Thank you for your help.

[Vinnie R.]

Good day Vinnie

I am about to activate my Maggie 1.6 with dedicated active crossovers. I plan to have a stereo amp per loudspeaker to drive the panel. (one channel for the bass, the other channel for the mid/trebel). Would you recommend to use your stereo amp for such a set up? Is your 30 Watt amp powerfull enough to drive the M 1.6? And is it stable enough too?

Thank you for your help.

Hi Mediapet,

Welcome to Audiocircle and the RWA forum.  Nice to see new members joining and posting!

Yes, you can use two Signature 30s, each one dedicated to one speaker.  Your active crossover should have two RCA outputs -- one for the bass and one for the mid/treble.

You need to make sure that the negative (-) speaker connection to the bass (one channel of the amp) is not tied to the negative (-) speaker connection of the mid/treble section (the other channel of the amp).  Does this make sense? 

Is your 30 Watt amp powerfull enough to drive the M 1.6? And is it stable enough too?

IMO, the Sig 30 is as clean and powerful as any conservatively rated 30 watt amp can be.  The fact that you are using two amps (and using each amp to divide up the work load between bass and mid/treble duties for each speaker) makes this even better!  It should work out very well as long as you are not looking to really crank that volume up. 

You will get the benefits of monoblocks since you will have a dedicated amp per speaker (no crosstalk between the L and R channels, dedicated SLA batteries for each channel), AND you are pretty much getting the benefits of bi-amping since you'll be using a dedicated channel of the amp for the bass and mid/treble section...which the active x-over in the system to divide up the labor.  Sounds like a very nice way to drive them Maggies!      Maybe you can start a trend with Maggie lovers 

Best regards,

Vinnie

[samplesj]

I'm not sure if this got addressed or not.  The Maggies are 4 ohm speakers. 

Is the Sig30 stable driving 4ohm?  Out of curiosity what is their power rating at that rating? 

Then there is also the question of rolloff.  Do you incorporate any sort of mechanism to combat the TI chip issues with variable frequency response when not driving 6 ohm speakers?  It'd be a shame to lose the nice top end of a set of Maggies.

[Vinnie R.]

I'm not sure if this got addressed or not.  The Maggies are 4 ohm speakers. 

Is the Sig30 stable driving 4ohm?  Out of curiosity what is their power rating at that rating? 

Then there is also the question of rolloff.  Do you incorporate any sort of mechanism to combat the TI chip issues with variable frequency response when not driving 6 ohm speakers?  It'd be a shame to lose the nice top end of a set of Maggies.

Hi Jeremy,

Yes, you can use the Sig 30 to drive 4-ohms.  The max power output rating into 4-ohms (using the same low THD rating) is about 40 - 45 watts.  After that, you will hit the distortion
"knee" of the chip, or will trip the over-current limiting circuit. 

No worries about rolloff with 4-ohms... you'll get plenty of top end with the Maggies.

Also, I think you meant to say Tripath chip instead of TI, correct?

Best regards,

Vinnie

[samplesj]

No worries about rolloff with 4-ohms... you'll get plenty of top end with the Maggies.

Also, I think you meant to say Tripath chip instead of TI, correct?

Yes, sorry about the misattribution.  For some reason I thought TI made the tripath chips, but I see it is its own company.

So when you say no worries about rolloff does that mean you have a tweak that fixes the tripath impedance/frequency variability or that instead you feel it is so small as to not really matter?  Maggies are generally fairly flat in terms of impedance, so their impedance doesn't climb up in the higher frequencies to offset this rolloff.

I've seen measurements of the Super T (different amp obviously, but still tripath chips) and it is down 1 dB at 10k and a touch over 2dB at 20k with 4ohm speakers.  I don't think the 1.6s will go as high as the 3.6s, but at 40k it looks to be around 4.5 dB down.  I realize that people can't hear that high, but there exists some interesting reading about super tweeters and their effects.  If the speaker can put it out, why let the amp turn it back off.

[Vinnie R.]

Hi Jeremy,

I'm not sure if the TK2051 chipset has the same bass rolloff issues as the Sonic Impact T-amps (TA2024 chip) at 4-ohms.

What I can say is that if you listen to it with a 4-ohm load (I've done this...even with adding a 4-ohm resistor across the speaker terminals to bring the impedance down even lower for testing purposes), you won't hear any loss of high frequency content.  It is all there and sounds great! 

Best regards,

Vinnie