Background
One of our customers has had a Statement system in his main home for some years now and we’ve been upgrading parts of it on the usual but exciting HiFi journey that many of us go along. In the past we’ve always been a great advocate for Bi-Amping loudspeakers (Particularly Dali) because this has significant benefits improving the sound.
Firstly the load is shared by more amps, there are twice as many speaker cables so coupling is better, but the big one is that when you remove the links from the back of the crossover, you separate the filter circuits that drive the high and low frequency drive units. (TECHNOBABBLE ALERT !) This removes a lot of intermodulation distortion when the filters and drive units interact particularly around the crossover frequency.
The bottom line is it sounds better ! More open soundstage, more detail, more musical, less clutter, and the imaging improves to an astonishing level.
Until now we hadn’t really thought about Bi-Amping a Statement system because the NAP-S1 power amps already have a vice like grip on controlling the speakers. Anyway – a little thinking outside the box and we thought we’d give it a go ! A few years back we Bi-Amped a few customers Naim systems with two NAP250’s with great results.
In case you’re wondering the customer has a Melco (Dela) server and S-1 switch firing into a Linn Klimax DSM/3 Organik, and then into the Statement pre-amp. He also has two high end record decks. The speakers are Dali Kore’s – take a look here !
Planning and preparation
To prove the concept to the customer (and to have fun at our open evening) we pressed into service 4 x Linn Klimax Solo 500 amps and compared them with using just two. Clearly buying a second pair of Statement power amps was too expensive and impractical for just this exercise ! But we’ll come to that later……
The result of Bi-Amping our Dali Epikore 7’s (same mids and top end as the Kores) was astonishing ! They already sounded amazing, but Bi-Amped put them in a different league. Everyone heard it ! Our customer thought that single amped Statements sounded better than single-amped Solo 500’s but not as good as bi-amped Solo 500’s, so the conclusion was that Bi-Amped Statements would be better still ! Only one way to find out 🙂
Execution
So we packed our Demo Statement power amps into their flight cases and took them to the customer, installed them next to his existing system and ran an extra set of speaker cables.
We had some Super Lumina cables made up to split the Balanced outputs of the pre-amp and drive two power amps per channel.
A lot of work to find we may be wrong – but my instinct told me this was going to be special ! And I wasn’t wrong ……..
The moment we started to play something, the speakers simply disappeared and there were live musicians in the room ! Sounds Cliche but actually I’ve never heard anything so real. The images of the instruments and vocals were truly holographic – close your eyes and you’re there !
Conclusion
If you’re looking for a worthwhile upgrade and your speakers have two sets of terminals linked with busbars or wire connections, then consider Bi-Amping. We haven’t come across a combination yet, that doesn’t significantly improve the sound. Talk to us about your system and the possibilities !
This system is extremely high end and already sounded amazing by most peoples standards, but now is even better. It looks like it means business too ! We love the way the heatsinks mirror each other when standing side by side.
In a word WOW !