Posted by Lew on July 22, 2003 at 07:44:40:
In Reply to: Bi-Amping Full-Range ESL Speakers posted by Bob Ratner on July 16, 2003 at 08:50:13:
As I understand it, this approach is not recommended by Dr. West as it may result in saturation of the toroidal transformer. I think the factory recommends that the passive cross-over components remain in place at all times. Also, my own private observation is that there is no such thing as a "transparent" electronic cross-over, but if you are using passive components between the pre-amp and the two amplifiers, that could possibly work nicely. (But there will be insertion loss, and then one must hope for good level matching without having to add a dreaded variable resistor to tame the output at the top or bottom. Also, with passive components between pre-amp and amps, one is pretty much limited to a 6-db/octave slope, and this limits the choice of the cross-over point for the toroidal transformer.) I could be incorrect in my belief that deletion of the passive cross-over parts at the speaker end is verboten, so perhaps someone else with factory ties could comment. In the meantime, if it sounds good all of my theoretical objections don't mean much.