[Pierre_za]

Hi guys,
I'm trading up my old E90 soon for a new one. My current E90 has a reasonable amount of gear that will get salvaged, question is how to optimally re-use it. I can either go with the Hi-Fi setup or with the HK (Top Hi-Fi), doesn't really matter which as the cost difference is fairly benign.

Although the Top Hi-Fi might be the knee-jerk choice, with all my existing kit I'm not sure whether it necessarily constitutes the best option.
My current setup is:

Morel Dotech splits
JL Audio 12W1 sub
DLS CA12 monoblock for the sub
Boston GT-20 for the floor subs
Focal Solid4 4-channel amp for the splits, passively biamped

I plan on adding a JBL MS-8 irrespective of which option is taken.

With the Hi-Fi option, I guess the best would be to keep all the existing stuff and just add the MS-8 and a decent centre speaker and possibly upgrade the floor subs.

With the HK system the MS-8 is fed from speaker-level signals and many of the drivers and processing I pay for will get replaced/bypassed anyway. What I gain is side speakers and an easier upgrade job for the centre.

My questions from the experts here would therefore be:

1) It seems the best way to use the MS-8 is to run the front splits off a single channel pair with their passive crossover and then use a dedicated channel on the MS-8 for the floor subs, rears, sub and centre. The sides (if present) are parallelled with the rears. With this configuration, is there much to gain from having side speakers as they're not separately processed anymore?

2) Will there be any significant gain in using the Focal amp to drive the front splits or will the MS-8's amplification suffice? I ran an extra set of cabling on my E90 to the trunk for the tweeters to passive biamp them, i.e. the mids & tweets have their own amps but the filtering is still done with the passive crossover (the crossover was hacked to separate the high & lowpass inputs), but the audible improvement was marginal.

3) Any other suggestions?