I was talking to my sales guy at the stereo shop the other day. I bought the Alpine SPS-571A components speakers. He suggested buying an Alpine MRV-F340 4 channel amp and hooking up the tweeters to one channel each and the mids to the other 2 channels. Is this wise?

Will it sound any better the keeping the components hooked up together with the crossover? and just using 2 channels of the amp and using the other 2 channels for the rear speakers (which I was going to run just from my Alpine CDA-9830 head unit.

Any thoughts?

 

At first that sounded a little wierd to me... But I have seperates in my truck, with the tweets mounted in the door corner just below the window. At times the tweeters sound too harsh, even with the deck settings set to FLAT. I wish I had the equipment to try something like that - to tone down those highs a little.

Does that alpine amp have a high pass(really high) crossover? Or do those speakers have independant crossovers - I don't know how else you could safely do it.

 

It's called bi-amping. Either using a 4 channel amp or 2 2-channel amps to power 1 set of compents.

I've never tried before, and from what I have read on it with power being equal unless you are a bionic ears person you will not hear a difference.

The advantage of bi-amping is what frostby was touching on. With bi-amping you have more control over the how loud your tweeters and woofers are. If your tweeters are to much and you can't adjust them on the crossover, then you can turn the gains down without out affecting the woofers.

Before you do that though, make sure that your components crossover supports bi-amping. You should have 2 sets of inputs on them, 1 set of high inputs and 1 set of low inputs.

For 2 2-channel amps: amp1 would send it's right/left wires to the high input on the both crossevers, amp 2 would send it's right left wires to the low input on both crossovers. A 4 channel amp, channels 1 & 2 would go to the high inputs and channels 3 & 4 would go to the low inputs.

If your crossovers do not support bi-amping then you will need to add an external crossover before the amp and select the what the woofers get and the tweeters get manually (you would not use the components crossovers at all in this case).

 

The crossovers only have 1 input and 1 each output for the mids and tweeters. The amp that I will be using has seperate crossovers for channels 1 & 2 and 3 & 4.

Would I still need another cross over before the amp?

The sales guy also told me that if you put say 40 watts into the crossover it will then divide it into 20 watts per component piece. Does that sound right? I want to put say all 40 watts to the tweeter and another 40 watts to the mids. That is why I am thinking of doing this.

 

These are the comps I have in my truck:




If you notice on the x-over, there are 4 pairs of screws. 1 pair for tweeter output, 1 pair for woofer output. The other 2 pairs are inputs, if just running regularly I will only have 1 pair of them connected (in my case the far right terminals).

Should I wish to power my comps with either 2 seperate amps, or a 4 channel amp (1 channel each) I would then use the second set of inputs.

If your x-overs do not have that then do not worry about bi-amping because it is not supported.

If you want more description, you can download the pdf for those, it has a little info: XR 650


You only need a x-over before the amp if you plan on discarding the speakers x-overs. In that case you would have the crossover before the amp to adjust what range the woofer gets and what range the tweeter gets, then each speaker will be wired directly to the amp.

 

captainoblivious, what hu you using? also u running an amp?

 

An old Premier (720?) HU.

Amp right now is a Blaupunkt PA2100. 116x2 (birthsheet).

I am also getting an older Mark Antony amp (50x2 + 100x1 @ 12.2 volts) soon. Since I only have a regular cab truck that should be plenty of power for me, so that will go and the blaupunk will get moved over to the car.

You can see pics here:
http://www.sounddomain.com/id/dontblameme