Yamaha / Monitor 70 bi wire question

Schwingding

Hi all. I have a Yamaha HTR 5990 that supports bi wire/bi amp speaker connections. I have a new set of Polk Monitor 70's that support the same.

The Yamaha manual is either confusing or bumming me out. It says that in order to use the bi wire/amp feature I must use the Main speaker A outputs and the surround back outputs. One of the diagrams, however, shows the bi wire connections being made through main A and B terminals. I am uncertain which is true.

I have surround back speakers in my system, so if the bi amp feature requires use of those outputs, I'm out of luck.

Any help appreciated.

Schwingding

okiepolkie

Welcome to the forum.

I'm not sure you would be gaining much going this route. The power supply on typical receivers are not designed and built to provide any substantial improvements over single wire hook-up.

John K.

Schwing, another welcome. Although you connected them with a slash mark, the biwiring and biamping provisions on your Yamaha are completely separate. The biwiring is merely a parallel connection to the same amp channel by using the main A and B terminals and is essentially meaningless electrically. The biamping connection uses the main amp A terminal and the amp channel for the back surround(if it wasn't already being used for a back surround speaker, which you're doing)to drive the separate bass and treble sections of the speaker.

Don't be thinking that you're losing anything of significance by not biwiring or not being able to use the back surround amps for biamping. That form of passive biamping simply uses a different output transistor(s)to power the separate sections of the speaker, but all of the power comes from the same power supply section of the receiver and isn't increased. In particular, note that this doesn't "double" the available maximum power, as is sometimes claimed by those not well-informed on the subject.