135's? or x2 - 250's that is the question.

Hello, interesting situation, I have Ninkas with a 250 drives them no problem. I would think at first biamping would make sense, BUT I am very skeptical about biamping and I feel should be the final frontier. A few reasons
1)it introduces more complications( wires connectors etc)
2 if you have a 250 and you add another, it cant be better than say a 300 (assuming the 300 sounds better), it can play louder than i 250 though,
3 if you look at the Naim recommended systems, biamping is the very last step
4 I have tried a few biamped systems myself and I always preferred single amping (although I have never heard a naim system biamped)
So just my thoughts, but I would think a single 300 would sound better and play a little louder if not have more muscle to the music....same goes up the ladder a single 500 should sound better than 2 300s...just my thoughts...only way to know is to try 2 250s vs 1 300 anybody done this? or will a dealer loan them to you...

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I think about using another 250 in a bi-amp configuration

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IMO, a single pair of 135s will easily outperform a passive pair of 250s...in fact, apart from power advantages, you may even find a single 250 outperforms a biamped pair

Passive biamping is not the route I would go..if you need more power get a bigger amp

Comparing the "watts" misses the point

Laurie S

ken c recently ran a thread comparing passive 135s with a pair of active 250s.

he felt there were differences rather than a clear case of "black and white" preferences.

it would be worth doing a search for ken's thread, I felt ken's own comments were very helpful

Cheers

Don

It looks like I should try a pair of 135's and give them a try. A friend knows someone who may bring his over for me to have a listen to but until then I will have to wait to see, incidently a 300 is way out of my price range.

hello that would be a great demo a pair of 135s vs a 250 would love to hear the results. Ben r

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Originally posted by Laurie Saunders:
IMO, a single pair of 135s will easily outperform a passive pair of 250s...in fact, apart from power advantages, you may even find a single 250 outperforms a biamped pair

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You may well be absolutely right, but much depends IME on the speakers in use, with the efficacy of bi-amping being in inverse proportion to the complexity of their crossovers.

Given that a large part of the benefit of an active system stems from the removal of a passive crossover from the chain, a passively bi-amped system using speakers employing minimal crossovers should display quite a lot of that benefit, particularly as in this case there should actually be rather less gubbins in the chain than in a full active system.

IIRC early production samples of the Royd RR1 had their crossovers equipped with 2 pairs of sockets to make them suitable for bi-amping, but this was later made optional since it was found that they sounded better with a simpler, single-socketed crossover and the improvement was greater than bi-amping was thought to provide. And on any bi-amp capable speaker of course, getting rid of those horrible terminal bridges makes a big difference in itself.

We tried ours every which way and in our case bi-amping works really well with 2 x 160s (our crossovers don't even have a circuit board), but it won't work for everyone, and I don't discount the possibility that a single NAP500 would work better.

Best;

Mark

Hi, i have had experience of 2 250 amps in biamp mode and it was not good. The thorny issue of matching comes in and unless they are perfoming equally well you can end up with a sound worse than one on its own.

David

Good point, 2 amps although identical may sound somewhat different and it introduces more stuff to the signal, I too have never had good luck biamping, some guy named Einstien said " everything should be as simple as possible but no simpler" I don't know maybe he was going the speed of light when he said this...But as in most things in life it is soooooo true....source,amp,speakers,one set of cables...done...can't do it with anything less

Thanks for all the comments. It looks like the 135 evening will happen but not for a few weeks so as and when it does I will report as full as I can using a new thread to this one, I can't wait!

Another option is to run 2 x '125' until you can go active. There are apparently 2 flavors of 125 - 1) leave 2 250s unchanged but use just 1 channel of each, and 2) modify each 250 so only one amp channel gets power.

I can easily believe 2 x 135 beats passively biamped 250s, but my understanding is that active 250s vs. passive 135s is a closer call, with many listeners preferring active.

Phil

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is that active 250s vs. passive 135s is a closer call, with many listeners preferring active.

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Also, I know many that prefer a pair of passive 135s to a pair of active 250s

Why not have your "cake and eat it"?

.....go 4 active 135s..you know it makes sense


laurie S