Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater bi-wireing

No, you can use them to legitimately bi-amp if you take the time to do it right and you feel that you truly need to. However, the question of 'do you need to' and 'should you be messing with an already heavily researched crossover' is another debate altogether and one I'm not qualified to comment on.

Lol, it was just a light hearted poke at Axiom, don't take me too seriously.

That said, when someone comes here to ask, "how do I [fill in the blank] with my [fill in the blank]"... I'm of the opinion that if you paid for it, then whatever you feel like doing with it is what you should do with it. Run two sets of wires to your M80's, crack open the cross-overs & replace the caps, hang em in the back of your semi if you want. Don't let us talk you into or out of anything you want to do, we didn't buy them.

That's what I would tell anyone who has investigated a project, come to their own conclusion as to what they want to do, and is set on doing it... no matter how many of us feel it is a waste of time and/or money.

It's a different story for those coming here wanting to hear differing opinions to help them make up their minds on something they're completely ignorant of (like seeing two sets of binding posts, have no idea why there are two sets of binding posts, and ask, "hey should I be running two sets of wires to these things"?), then our personal opinions, for or against, are prequalified.

My M80's are pseudo-bi-amped*. I do it because I have the channels available on my amp, I like the way Canare 4S11 cable looks, and because I can.

Sound quality is subjective and therefore at the mercy of one's perception. A half a bottle of Jack Daniels has as much affect on sound quality as the most expensive speaker cables or amplifiers one can buy. To that end, I believe that my M80's sound a little better when bi-amped. Believe. Could be my imagination. Could by my amp. Could be real. I won't argue it with anyone because it's my head, my speakers, my gear, and my house. C'mon over and I'll demo the M80's for you both bi-amped and mono-amped and you can hear for yourself. Whether we agree or not, the pizza & beer's on me.

Now purely bi-wiring, where you're just running a pair of wires from each +/-, I have a little more trouble believing that it can achieve any meaningful gains. YMMV and I'm not going to tell you it's useless, just that *I* have a harder time believe it makes a difference.

The bottom line is that Axiom provides the dual inputs on the M80 so that you can bi-amp them if you want. If you want. If you've got the extra channels available on your AVR or amp, go for it. Give it a listen. At most you're out is the speaker cable. Good luck and have fun. That's what this hobby is all about.

Pseudo-bi-amped = RCA pre-outs split to form two pairs of L and R pre-out outputs, each output fed to a discrete amplifier bank, the outputs of each amplifier running to the high or low end of each M80.

I was talking about you searching not Pat...

Well Peter I will chim in on your claim that you feel it does sound a bit better when bi-amped by saying that my very first configuration when I bought the XPA-3 was running 12 guage wire from the L/R main posts of the Denon to the top posts on the M80's (removed the gold connectors of course...), then ran RCA cables from the L/R pre-outs to the Emotiva, and then ran 12 guage wire from the Emotiva to the bottom posts on the M80's.

I did nothing to the M80's as far as disconnecting the cross-over or any of that. All I was after was I wanted to push the twin woofers with all 300 watts the Emotiva supplied, and the top four speakers with the 125 watts the Denon supplied. It sounded fantastic, better than the Denon by itself I thought. I felt the bottom end was really, really tight. And as all of us M80 owners already know, they play tight to begin with. But a quick comparison left me impressed.

The only problem was, for whatever reason, once I pushed the volume up to around 85%, the right speaker would trip the fault circut on the Emotiva. I could not find a solution to this problem. I swapped wires, restripped both ends of the wire. Tightened things up, moved things around, pulled the power cord out of the wall, tried plugging it into other outlets... Nothing helped.

So I removed the wire running from the Denon to the top post on the M80's, replaced the gold connector, and just pushed them with the Emotiva. Problem solved. I'm still confused as to why this was a problem, but it didn't matter too much to me, because they sounded fantastic.

Still, I would have liked to have been able to do some comparisons between the two set-ups at 90 - 95% volume to really see if I could tell if one set-up was superior to the other. But I guess it wasn't meant to be. Oh well, I'm happy with it.