I need quick help- Bi-amp Threshold/McIntosh

Tom -- now you're confusing me... Perhaps you've misinterpreted something I said in my last post. If you're buying a more powerful stereo amp with two sets of outputs for each channel, the main benefit is the extra power. The additional outputs I believe, are just a convenience feature which makes it easier to biwire. I think what you want (correct me on this) is more slam combined with a more liquid and musical presentation. Those two things can be mutually exclusive but do not have to be. Possibly a high-powered hybrid amp (tube driver stage and MOSFET outputs) would give you what you seek. With the B&Ws, biwiring seems to work very well, so I recommend going that route. And I mean two separate sets of speaker cables to each amplifier channel -- definitely remove the straps between the woofers and the midrange section. I have a set of B&W CDM 9NTs and noticed a nice performance gain.

I don't know the power rating of your Threshold amp, but if it is 200 WPC or more then you might not need more power. I am using an InnerSound ESL amp to drive my B&Ws (300 WPC) and that plays them as loud as I stand. I am also using a Z-man ASE tube line buffer, which I picked up used for $120 and that gives me the sweetness and liquidity of tubes with the heft and slam of solid-state. The Z-man unit is excellent and the Musical Fidelity X10-D (for around the same price used) is supposed to be very good as well (but I haven't tried it). The Z-man is a small unit that uses one 12AX7 tube. So if you have enough power in the Threshold, try biwiring and get ahold of a Z-man or an X10-D. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at how much the B&Ws perk up. Or you could spend a small fortune on a better amp and get no better results. :)

Plato, I think you are confusing bi-amping with bi-wiring:

I went from one 300watt/channel Krell amp to two 300 watt/channel Krell amps. Therefore, I went from 300 to 600 watts per channel. (or in my case with 4 ohm speakers, from 600 to 1200 watts per channel.)
In my case the result was the biggest improvement that I have ever made to my system, but to be fair, I also went form a passive to an active crossover. ... And it was worth every penny.

Richard

Now I'm confused. Running 300 watts to your tweeters and another 300 watts to your woofers does not make it 600 watts does it? I'm no engineer, but even my basic knowlege suggests this is still 300 watts? Tom

I think to easily understand the concept, consider the following:

Person Q uses one three hundered watt amp to run his two way speaker system. His speakers have a woofer and a mid-high speaker. The speakers have an internal crossover that devides the power to each amp. For simplicity, lets say each speaker uses the same power. So the 300 watt amp will have 150 watts available for each of them (woofer and mid-highs)

Now lets say person R uses the three hundred watt amp for his woofer and then went out and bought another 300 watt amp for the mid-highs. Person R now has available 300 watts for each of the speakers (woofer and mid-high).