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Old 08-27-2022, 06:39 PM
MiamiAudiophile MiamiAudiophile is offline
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Join Date: Aug 2022
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Default Hybrid active biamp

I’m the buyer of the XVR1. With Andrew’s help, I biamped my R1s, and I’m quite happy with the results. I’m using 4 Benchmark AHB2s, all in bridged mono mode as amplifiers. These were designed by Andrew’s twin brother, and they are exceptional, especially for the price.

Prior to this I had a pair of Constellation Centaur mono amps. For my ears, a single pair of AHB2s outperformed the much more expensive Centaurs. Two pairs of AHB2s in a passive vertical biamp was quite a bit better than a pair of Centaur. Cleaner high end, zero distortion, dead quiet, exceptionally smooth, highly resolving. The next step was to implement a hybrid active biamp. This took the system to another level of performance all together, but I could not have done this without Andrew’s help.

In the hybrid active biamp set up the woofer low pass filter in the R1s is bypassed. This requires removing one of the woofers and doing some minor, easily reversible rewiring, but it’s well worth the effort. In this set up the woofers are directly connected to the amplifiers, with no crossover in between. The low pass function is implemented by the XVR1. The woofer low pass in the R1, no longer in the circuit, is a weak link in the speaker as it uses an iron core inductor. All the inductors in the passive crossover for the coax are air core.

Andrew was brilliantly able to develop setting for the XVR1 so we could keep the coax passive filter intact. The XVR1 high pass is providing additional filtering for the coax. All this was done in such a way so the woofer and coax phases would align. We got a bit lucky in this regard. The system sounds amazing, unlimited dynamics, excellent bass response.
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