I've read several articles explaining biamping, but what I don't understand is: how do you biamp if your speakers (in my case, mini 9.0's) only have one set of terminals?
Second is, how does vertical biamping work, in the sense that the amplifier for the right speaker has, say, the right output of the amp going to the woofer while the left output is going to the tweeter. The amp "thinks" that what is going to the tweeter is actually a full-range signal to the left speaker, which I would think would caus ...
Adding to MaxCast's comments...
You must connect the drivers seperately to an electronic crossover, either with or without a second set of binding posts. You may be able to add binding posts to your mini 9.0s to allow for active biamping. When you do active biamping with norh Marble 9.0 speakers, you disconnect both drivers of each speaker from the internal crossover, and connect them to their proper binding posts.
I would think that with synthetic marble, you could drill a second set of holes and add binding posts. Check with norh on this issue, they can give you advice on how it could be done.
Another issue is, are the mini 9.0 drivers suited for active biamping. That is, can they work with some electronic crossover instead of requiring some feature of the mini 9.0 passive crossover. (the Marble 9.0 drivers can work with electronic crossovers, in my case with the built in electronic crossover in the Multiamps). The drivers need to accept the same level of input from the stereo amp (i.e. 100 watts per channel, 1 channel for each driver) Again, double-check with norh on this issue.
Then you need a suitable electronic crossover.
This brings me to your second question: how vertical biamping works (active vertical biamping).
With so many possible setups, it helps to remember that active biamping takes us out of the realm of receivers with a preamp, 2 amps, and a tuner all in one unit. Also out of the realm of a unitized speaker, with woofer, tweeter, connectors, and passive crossover all in a "black box". We are now dealing with individual preamp, amps (one for each driver), the 4 drivers, connectors/binding posts, crossovers.
Of course an amp doesn't "think", it merely copies the signal that is sent to it - in this case, by the electronic crossover, which in this case sits between the preamp and the amps. Because it is an electronic crossover it should not weaken or corrupt nearly as much of the signals the way a passive crossover can. The signal gets copied much more accurately for each driver. That and the fact that there is plenty of power overhead for each driver, as well as flexibility in crossover points, are the main benefits of active biamping.
A stereo amp has 2 identical amps in the box, say 100 watts each. You could also use 2 monoblock amps instead of a stereo amp. 2 amps can be used for left and right channels of a stereo signal, or for one channel, woofer and tweeter in the case of active biamping. Then you would need a second set of amps for the other channel's woofer and tweeter. The key is that the electronic crossover handles the output to the channels and the drivers, including the crossover frequency. ( In the case of triamping there are 3 amps per channel with 2 crossover points for the three drivers.)
Hope this makes sense. Someone correct me if I missed something.
You can see that active biamping can be a somewhat proprietary solution or a custom solution. The Marble 9.0s were designed with biamping in mind from the beginning, and that is what the Multiamps were designed for also. (They were both designed to be used for regular amping as well.)
