Here is my system, I put it in the AudioHolics system gallery thread, it is the second listing on that page, #342. I will post more when I have time to do some more tests, real busy at the moment though.
Thanks,
Brad
I have been pondering your problem for some days.
It will not be possible to give a definitive answer, to your problem without oscilloscope, signal generator at the minimum.
I suspect your problem is voltage related.
It is not understood by many that you can clip all amps at zero watts. In other words any amp can be sent into voltage clipping, even when producing zero watts.
Now in most speakers impedance drops below 600 Hz except for tuning peaks.
Now with passive biamping both amps are reproducing the same signal although power output is different. Now you seem to think that when biamping the power available is the sum of the amp power. Nothing could be further from the truth. The HF amp will deliver signifivanlt less power than the bass amp. In fact the power increase is usually less than 3db and negligible.
However, once you decouple the crossover sections the impedance seen by the HF amp in particular is drastically changed. The impedance will be high and the voltage at the output terminals high.
So in your situation, I suspect you are either sending you HF amp into voltage clipping or you are sparking caps in the crossover from excess voltage. Either way if you keep this up there is a good chance you will do serious damage.
There really is no case at all in my view for passive biamping. The reason for biamping is to get away from problems of passisve crossovers, which passive biamping does not do.
The next issue is that you are using different amps for top and bottom. I would bet you don't know the phase. response of the amps. There is a very good bet they are different. Many amps are phase inverting and many are not. The owners manual is almost always silent about this.
If you are going to use different amps for biamping of any type, you must have instruments and know how to use them. You need to measure the phase response of your amps or you don't know how to wire them up.
My strong recommendation to you is to forget passive biamping, which I never recommend, despite what you might have read elsewhere.
If you are going to contemplate biamping, of any type, you need to be expert, and if you use different amps you must own instruments, and know how to use them.
The types of problems you are experiencing are not unusual, and in fact to be expected.
Courses of action like biamping are usually recommended by very ignorant journalists who have no grasp of the real issues involved.