Bi-Amping in CA 540A (Ver 2)

Hi guys,

I have recently installed CA 540A with MS 906i for Stereo.

My Sound engineer told me that it's possible to do Bi-Amping with 540A using A+B Speaker posts in AMP.

Is it true? if so, what will the actual RMS for the amp?

As per manual, it is 65w x 2, dealer says 65w x 4 (No company will include remote speakers wattage in manual)

Pls help.

Regds,
Kalyan.

I guess he meant bi-wiring.

Kalyan,

As unLeash has mentioned, there is a bit of confusion that needs to be cleared.

There are two similar sounding but completely different terms - Bi-Amping, and Bi-Wiring.

Most speakers are connected to an amplifier by one pair of terminals on each speaker. Within these speakers, a crossover distributes the signal (modified appropriately) to each of the drivers in the speaker.

Some speakers are set up to be either bi-wired or bi-amped. Most speakers that support bi-amping/bi-wiring have two pairs of terminals and a metal link / bus bar for shorting the two pairs together when used in the normal way. The 2 pairs of terminals are usually referred to as Low pass (LO) and high pass (HI). The LOs are connected to the woofer and the HI are connected to the tweeter/midrange.

Bi-Wiring
Bi-wiring means that a speaker is driven by two pairs of wires from the SAME amplifier output. One cable pair connects HI to the amp, and the other cable pair connects LO to the SAME amp output that you connected the HI cable to. Generally the two cable pairs for a channel be separated by at least a few inches. In any case, the effect appears to be small.

Bi-Amping
Bi-amping means that the two pairs of terminals on a speaker are connected to independent amplifier outputs. In this case you would need two stereo amplifiers,

The point of bi-amping is that most of the power required to drive the speakers is used for low frequencies. Bi-amping allows you to use amps specialized for each of these uses, such as a big solid-state amplifier for the LO drivers and higher quality (but lower power) amp for the higher frequencies. When you use two different amplifiers, be careful to match levels between them.

The 540A
You cannot bi-amp with a single 540A. You can only bi-wire.

The 540A has two set of speaker outputs labelled as A and B. So you can bi-WIRE your speakers with thus amp.

Each speaker will have its own HI and LO, with +ve and -ve terminals. Using 4 strands of cable i.e two sets, wire the speakers HI to a set of terminals both +ve and -ve on the amp, wire the LO to the other set of terminals, +ve and -ve on the amp, making sure these are of the same speaker on the amp, e.g left. Repeat with the other speaker on the other set of terminals, left or right, whichever you haven't done already. Remove the linking metal bits too. Please see picture below for the wiring diagram.

The advantages of bi-wiring and bi-amping are at best controversial, and best experienced personally.

Attached Images

biwire-3.jpg (18.0 KB, 53 views)

Tks a lot Mr.Venkat.

I even approached cambridge audio and they replied as

21/07/2008 13:25 - Ed Selley

Dear Sir,
Thanks for your inquiry. The Speaker B terminals can be used for biwiring but as the output is taken off the same amplifier output the power figure remains the same as when speaker A is used on its own.
Regards
Ed Selley
Cambridge Audio


Regds,
Kalyan.