tri-mono active setup?

[Bad silver]

Are there advantages/disadvantages of powering 3-way components with 6 separate amps? Is it going to improve channel separation by giving each amplifier mono signal?

I have too many good amplifiers sitting in my storage that need to be used somehow

[jol50]

Mostly so you can go active with the crossovers, easier to tune that way. Lot of people go with 4/6/8 ch amps for that though, but yeah I might go with a bunch of amps soon too.

[SoundLogic]

Wow! as long as you use the same kind of amps to power the same sections ,you cant use 6 amps all different for obvious reasons.So if you have three sets of twins (best that i could come up with) ,I cant see why you should not go active.
You will need,active xover and a preamp to control overall volume and accept sources.Other things you need to consider is the gain structure of your amplifiers and the phase response.It would help if they are similar in class.

Once you have all these down,I can see only benefits in throwing away your passive xovers with their power sapping inductors and grotty 1 dollar resistors and connecting the drivers directly to the amp (from a pure physics point of view,there are some incredible speakers out there using passive xo's,going active might only make them marginally better ).I would suggest you use a highish value capacitor inline with the tweeter to protect it from switching transients and the occasional miscalculation with the xover points.All in all a complex exercise but since you have amps lying around worth a shot ,may result in some audio nirvana if not ,atleast you can boast of more horsepower .

[ppia600]

Originally Posted by Bad silver

Are there advantages/disadvantages of powering 3-way components with 6 separate amps? Is it going to improve channel separation by giving each amplifier mono signal?

I have too many good amplifiers sitting in my storage that need to be used somehow

Advantages:
-better sq overall
-better damping
-less distortion
-no passive crossovers sucking power and picking up noise from nearby fuel pump wires
-capability of doing very fine tuning between individual drivers and channels (as long as each amp channel has individual gain)
-something else I can't remember at the moment

Disadvantages:
-more weight from added amps
-more wires from running three sets of wires to each set of components = even more weight
-worse gas mileage
-worse car handling
-slower accleration
-more space in your car taken by amps
-more complex preamp/signal processing setup
-more rca's with possibility of picking up more noise