[Vintage Pete]

Originally Posted by SCAudiophile

Vintage Pete: That's correct that in horizontal or vertical biamping like this, you send the same full range signal to all amps with either a single preamp output of sufficent gain over 1 interconnect pair that splits out to 2 pairs of interconnects feeding the amps via Y-cable correspondingly or better yet, using an advanced preamp that allows 2 simultaneous outputs like the Esoteric C-02X, C-02, C1 and many others, skip the Y adapter and run 2 pairs of interconnects. I have a preference for performance of the latter with the gear and setups where I've done this however what is best for your system is dependent on the gear and available cables.

The R1s do have jumpers that are normally engaged...replacing the good quality factory jumpers with bespoke jumpers matching your speaker cables yields even better results, fyi, based upon R1s and others that I've owned.

You do not need an active crossover with the R1s, or any biwire-able, biamp-able speaker to do this.

You could have a passive crossover built to handle the initial frequency split externally and some speakers do this with great results as the vendor preferred stock configuration while others provide add-ons (Evolution Acoustics EXACT external crossover is an example that does external traditional crossover you can add on later..). In that case however, unless the speaker has no internal crossover at, even if you are passively crossed over with an external box, you are still using the internal crossover in some ways.

When wiring up like this (biwire or biwire and biamped) you are still leveraging the internal crossover on the R1s for at least the mids and treble with kill filters/others parts making sure low frequency info is not sent to mids and treble and those drivers only receive the info they are supposed to. Kill filters or other parts on the speaker make sure that only low frequency info is sent to the bass drivers and any info beyond their intended operating range is not sent to them. Natural affinity of the drivers beyond that then guides the signal flow.

ScAudiophile....thanks for this explanation. I am of course familiar with passive crossovers, and also Bi and tri-amplification using an active electronic crossover to feed lows, mids and highs to separate amplifiers as the case may be. As you point out, unless the loudspeaker system has no crossover at all, we're still going to utilize the loudspeaker's internal crossover in some way. Such is the case in my primary setup, with an active crossover taking everything from 63hz down, summing it and sending it to a single mono amplifier to feed a subwoofer. The rest (above 63hz) is then sent to left and right mono amplifiers, which then feed my main loudspeakers as usual, and the main speaker's passive crossovers take care of the rest.

So, if I understand your explanation correctly, once the jumpers are removed from the R1's, and the separate terminals are fed from identical amplifiers, the low and hi-pass circuitries of the R1 are going to send what is needed to the appropriate drivers and disregard (roll off) the rest.

What was throwing me here is the use of a Y-adapter to bring amplifiers that are designated as "low" and high" amps without first utilizing an active crossover.

I also don't think I was ever familiar with the term "horizontal biamping", and strongly suspected that whatever that meant was likely key to my having a better understanding.

I have seen the jumper setups on some speaker systems and knew that these would be removed in certain applications, such as biamping. But, I never thought too deeply about how one might bi-amply this type of system, somewhat splitting things up inside (which is not what I am doing).

So, assuming I have all this right, I have one last question. You have mentioned in your post both "horizontal" and vertical" bi-amping. What is the difference here?