Monoblocks vs Vertical bi-amping vs Horizontal bia

Check the Cary website. Dennis Had's expert analysis on vertical biamping compared to monoblocks is simplified

I dissagree with the "blanket stements" saying that verticle or horizontal, or whatever is the way to go. It depends on the situation largely. I can easily see where, at times, it would be better to possibly do one or the other.
One possiblity for people to STRONLY consider with full range speakers(especially 3 way speakers), is to biamp using an inexpensive(relatively) ss bass amp on the bottom(if covering mostly only bass down bellow 200hz), and whatever amp matches the sonics of your speakers up top!
For instance, Parasound makes SUPERB amps for bass!!! They've always had very very dyamic and authoritative/well controlled bass from these amps, and they come with a volume control to adjust gain as well!...this makes it perfect for biamping in my oppinion.! You can not only level match the two amps this way much easier, but you can take advantage of the excellent bass response from the amp, and let your midrange and top end be handled by a more "finess" amp up top...tube, SS or otherwise.
I've done Biamping in the past, and I like this option, functionally and cost wise, very much!

Like Rick Martin, I've also used a tube on top and solid state on bottom. It sounded really great, but I didn't want to keep so much money tied up in amps. So, I've moved along....

Hey guys, thanks for all your feedback. Now that we have our vertical and horizontal biamping definions sorted out, I'd still like to know why one would go with monoblocks vs vertical biamping as each amp is still only pushing one speaker load? I don't believe this question has been fully addressed yet.

Also, If I were to use two identical stereo amps and compare the sound from a vertical biamp config to a horizontal biamp cofig, would there be any differences in sound between the two approaches? Is one likely to sound "better" than the other? Have any of you tried it and if so what'd 'ya discover?

Are there general guidlines or rules of thumb that can be used to indicate situations where one amping scenario is better than another? For example, I have KEF Ref Series 104/2 speakers at 91dB and 4ohm which are a bit soft in the bass so a SS amp would be great while using a SET tube amp for the mids/hi's. In this situation I could see that you might be gettin the best of both worlds rather than using just a SS or tube amp in either a vertical or horizontal config. Thanks for your input.

Kevin

It would be hard to combine SET with SS I think since SS usully has more wattage than SET.

I was using ARC CA50 (45watts)on HF and Aleph 3 (30 watts) on LF. Theoretically, the HF should be 1.5 db louder, and I definitely can tell the difference. Good thing I am not a bass freak.

Anyways, in most cases, I would think horizontal bi-amping sounds better since each amp has a narrower frequency range to work with. This allows the PSU and whatever filters in the amp to perform more efficienty. In actual practice, you'd have a smoother sound and more realistic transients between HF and LF.