I am a newbie to the world of HiFi and also new to PS Audio. I just got the Stellar DCA and S300. Have been enjoying the clarity and what I was missing in music over the years. My question is, can the outputs of the S300 be used to drive two sets of speakers?
I read about BiWiring threads a bit. My speakers dont have two binding posts, so separating the bass versus highs is a No. I do have a pair of speakers which does well in highs and another pair which does well in the mid bass lower bass range. Can I use the s300 to drive total 4 speakers?
That would be a total of about 3.5Ω and I just checked, the S300 page says that for 2Ω, it’s “stable for musical transients.” If you have cables and it’s not a huge deal, I’d just give it a shot. It might just work or it might be terrible. But you’re not going to damage anything (just make sure you turn the volume down before).
Wouldn’t recommend doing this. Though you might fill highs with one and lows with the other, you’ll have overlapping coverage of all frequencies, so your frequency response curve would be a mess. You need one good set of speakers and/or maybe a sub.
You can though you’ll want to make sure there’s not too low an impedance to pair them. Worst case is you add the second pair of speakers and the amp will go into protection mode, which won’t damage anything. Give it a try.
Thank you for your response. I did try. And it worked like a charm. The only downside I saw was I lost the clarity when I had just two speakers instead of 4. And I am almost sure that is because of overlapping coverage of frequencies like tensor9 had responded to above. BTW, the speakers I hooked upto are DCM Time Windows and Infinity References Six’. I though the Infinity’ dominated the DCM’, except for guitar pieces which DCM’ sort of reproduce exceedingly well.
I have decided to hook up the infinity’ only, and Use the DCM’ with Home Theater Set Up, which is separate.
Once again, thank you for your response. Looking forward to the next Ohm’ Law episode.
Out of curiosity, why does the S300 have two set of speaker binding posts for each channel? If hooking up 4 speakers not so great, what is the purpose in the design?
I do have bi-wore speakers. Is the difference found by using two different types of speaker cable? Or is there an advantage to running 2 sets of the same model of cable to each speaker?
I use speaker cables as a means of tuning. I discovered I like silver plated short (2.5m) runs for my tweeters - I can hear the difference if I put 3.5m runs of the same cable. Internally within the speaker cabinet it’s likely that thick wires are used for bass but thinner wires for mid and treble. It’s worth experimenting because IMO you don’t need to spend a lot of money on the cable once you start mixing.
I experimented with an Audioquest cable which immediately made a difference. So then I experimented with bi-wiring. I saw from a Paul video I think that bass is harder to drive and tweeters easier. So I put regular speaker cable on the tweeter. Sounds better to me. And it is fun to experiment. I feel confident silver speaker cables would be even better. But cables definitely do make a difference up to a point. Experiment. It is fun.
I use 6mm copper for bass, about 4mm for mid, thin silver plated for treble (I obviously have three way binding posts as do all large PMC or ATC speakers).
