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RE: P 5 bass management to biamp 4 channels?

Posted by JBen (A) on February 21, 2015 at 18:17:50

In Reply to: Maggie 3 Series and Parasound P 5 posted by HiOnFi on February 20, 2015 at 04:38:26:

Been meaning to reply to this since yesterday. Of all the beautiful virtues that the P5 has, this one may be a little bit of a stretch. I was intrigued by the P5 at one time.

Then, late last year, I was trying to locate a second B&W subwoofer for a friend in Craigslist locally. I found the subwoofer AND the seller also was the owner of a Parasound P5. To boot, the guy owned a few Maggies (then in storage) plus a pair of Apogee Duetta.

Heaven, I thought! I may have solved my [bass] worries at the time (too long a story). Not really. As it turned out the subwoofer part was escaping him. I even tried to help him in his frustration. Super enchanting as the P5 can be, there's no practical way to control timings in analog, to sync the subwoofer properly...AND there's no subwoofer or bass L/R output either. It is just one typical summed subwoofer output, great as it may sound.

I did tell him what had worked best for me: place the subwoofer(s) at the same plane of the planars. In this case, the Duettas. It was tough to do so in his place but he eventually tried it later and that worked. Now, his are "subwoofers", not large Maggies.

So, in theory you could do the same, move the Divas & Maggies to about the same plane and feed the Maggies the summed subwoofer bass signal...not that I am tickled pink by the latter.

Still, two things would worry me:
1. Loss of opportunity. It would be great if we could find a discreet L/R bass signal for each Maggie. I don't see a TV there, music could use better than a summed signal...me thinks.

2. Depending on crossover point, some unneeded distortion may happen on the Maggies bass driver. If I understood you right, you are running the bass panels but there's no signal going to the midrange? I wish I could show you the dynamic behavior of a shared Mylar diaphragm in such a situation. It is likely that the distortion on the Mylar panel output is much higher than it should be. (If so, a "cure" could be to power the midrange but without a music signal, which could damp its movement and arrest mechanical interferences.)

Hmmm, the more I think about it, the more item #2 above may deserve great attention. The higher you cross the signal at the Maggies, the worse the distortion. If you went to all this trouble to take out the Diva's bottom out of the equation...darn, let's make sure that the Maggies' midrange is not causing artifacts.

I hope that this made some sense but please ask if not.

Edits: 02/21/15 02/21/15

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