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How Do I Use a Speaker’s Biamp Connections?

Al Griffin  |  Mar 17, 2015

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Q I have a home theater system powered by an AV receiver for watching movies, but I also want to connect a turntable and separate stereo amp to the system’s front speakers for listening to music. If a speaker has biamp connections, can you connect two separate sources to it? I want to connect the stereo amp to the top jacks on my speakers and my AV receiver to the lower jacks. Will that work? Clint Yarborough / via e-mail

A No, it will not. Here’s why: Those dual input jacks on the back of your speakers are intended for biamping, not connecting separate sources.

Take a look at the back of your speakers. You’ll see a pair of metal jumpers that connect both sets of input terminals and enable the audio signal to flow to both the tweeter/midrange drivers and the woofer. Inside the speaker is a circuit called a crossover that filters the mid and high frequencies from low-frequency portions of the audio signal and directs them to the appropriate drivers. When you disconnect those jumpers, however, you can use separate stereo amp channels to independently power the speaker’s midrange/tweeter drivers and woofer.

The benefit to biamping is often cited as increased headroom, though you can also get the same result by instead using a more powerful amp.

COMMENTS
jnemesh's picture
Submitted by jnemesh on March 17, 2015 - 10:39am

Take those cheesy metal clips (shown in the picture above) and throw them in the garbage! Then take some speaker cable, terminate with bananas or spades (whatever you ARENT using for your speaker wire termination) and make jumpers of your own. This will DRAMATICALLY improve your sound quality, at minimal cost. The jumpers are there just to keep things working...but they are far from optimal.

Or you could just buy some bi-wire speaker cables (pick your favorite brand) that are made to take advantage of this connection, even when you are running just one amplifier. Not as good as bi-amping, but far better than using jumpers!

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