Yes, what we are talking about is one channel driven…I typically refer to this as the ‘pseudo-monoblock’ mode. Two of my friends who did this with their DBLs, considered it value for money as it was a rather dramatic improvement over one 500 driving both channels. The 500 is already internally bridged, which is how it gets 140 wpc.
As far as lopsided currrent gain between channels-Naim deliberatly used to do this when their NAXO did vertical biamping, with one channel feeding LF and the other the HF.
In terms of VFM, back in the pre-Statement days, this was the only way of improving a passive system once you already had one 500-at least if you wanted to remain in the Naim fold.
Others have tried this pseudomonoblock with 110, 140, 200 and 250s as well, and even the 110 amps showed clear improvements.
Interesting. I might give that a try one day if I ever have speakers that support it and two power amps of roughly the same age.
Just to point out that any pair of speakers will support it as this is talking about using one channel from each power amp, the other channel left unused.
That’s one of two scenarios and not the one described by @RonToolsie. I’d probably try single channel biamping. I’d never bother with something that wasted half a power amp.
This if course assumes you CAN biamp your speakers. Biamping speakers with Naim amps may or may not have great results. I have passively biamped a set of Sonus Faber Extremas with 4xNAP135 and honestly, they sounded 5x as good as they did with 2x135 and 10x as good as they did with 1x250. But passively biamping a set of Linn Tukans with 2x250 did not really sound much differerent from driving them with a single 250. But slipping in an inexpensive IXO and then using them actively was truly a huge improvement. A SNAXO/Supercap further advanced the performance. As did replacing 2x250 with 4x135.
But for the SBL/DBL etc, the PXO are not splittable and passive bi/triamping is simply not possible. In those circumstances you have to resort to a pseudo-monoblock configuration to allow using more than one amplifier…yes this may seem to be be a waste of some resources, but until you try it, you have no idea of how good this can be.
One thing is almost certain…running a pair of stereo amps pseudomonoblock will always be equal to or greater than a single stereo amp, and almost certainly greater than. The disclaimer is that they have to be pretty closely matched, which may not be the case if you are running a chrome bumper and an olive amp.
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