@Hayabusa is correct in pointing out that you can get close to double the power with an active crossover. I saw you mention the miniDSP but did overlook that the passive crossovers can be defeated. Since this is a three way speaker, you would need to do some calculations (or tests) to determine how you divide the drivers and to see how much power you can gain.
What I don't really get is that the speakers just seem pretty subdued to me at full volume on the Fosi V3 Mono which should put out a legit 180 clean watts. In my current 12x20 living room, not the room they were purchased for which is much larger, they're kind of 'loud enough'. I measured them at a listening position from 10-12 feet away at 72 db. It seems to me with room reinforcement that should have been like a 1-2 watt level. I don't get it. I tried it with everything I could find feeding it.
That just sounds like a gain problem even more. I'm pretty sure you would not sit there in a relaxed manner if 180 W were playing
The Fosis do have a gain switch in the back, you should probably check if that is in the higher position. Should only be relevant for RCA inputs, though. Their input sensitivity is somewhere around 1.7 V for RCA, I think (more infos are burried in this thread), so a 0 dB digital signal with the miniDSP at full volume in the config and no EQ or pre-amp active should be able to drive the V3 Monos to full power. For other sources, you need to check their maximum output voltage.I owned a pair of 3.7 Maggies for c. 10 years and was never tempted to bi-amp, though I did use a pair of sub-woofers. The amp I drove them with was rated at 150w/8ohms. It sported a bias current meter on the front. I never saw the needle move. Maggies aren't power hungry when used within their performance limits.
I've fed the v3M from the WIIM, direct from a Chromecast Audio (CCA) puck, and from CCA's optical output to a Topping D30 DAC. The WIIM and the CCA both put out 2 Vrms and the topping puts put 2.1. Supposedly that is enough to drive the V3M to full volume. Maybe there is some configuration problem inside of the Deezer app that we use for streaming music. I have check and rechecked and swapped setting back and forth.
What do you mean by "subdued"? A lot of folk think Maggies need to be loud to sound good, for various reasons, but I do not know if you mean the volume is lower for a given control setting or something else. They do not radiate much off the sides so do not add a lot of reflections that "fill a room" like conventional speakers except from the back wave. That is partly why folk say they have a narrow sweet spot (plus as dipoles they actually do have a fairly narrow radiation pattern). Try making a smaller equilateral triangle and sit closer with them pointed at you, move back and forth a bit, and see if you can find their (narrow) sweet spot. Sitting too far away can be problematic.
Maggies rate their sensitivity higher than conventional speakers because Maggies send most of their energy to the front (and rear), so Magnepan "fudges" their rating by 3 dB or so to account for the lack of energy radiated to the sides. Room reinforcement is mostly from the rear wave and very much depends upon how far they are from the rear wall and how reflective it is. One or two watts average power sounds about right for you, but peaks are probably 50 to 100 W.
All the "big power talk" is from their low impedance (3-4 ohms typically) and low sensitivity (80 to 86 dB/2.83 Vrms typical) so they need more power than most conventional speakers for the same SPL even before room gain is considered. My first pair of MG-I's sounded great with a 25 W/ch tube amp when I was sitting about 6' away, and awesome in a larger room with 75 W on the mid/tweeter though having a 200+ W on the bass panels helped a lot -- along with a good subwoofer or three.
Isnt half the advantage of going active removing the passive xover?
The easy and factory approved way to bi amp leaves the mid/high ox in place and bypasses the low/mid
Back in the day, for outdoor PA systems you could drive the bass amp into clipping and not have the 18" drivers reproduce the high frequencies that accompany clipping distortion. Or at least it was a lot farther down than with a passive system.
I said "internal" crossover. Most speakers that I have seen with separate high and low connections outside the box do not bypass (remove) the internal crossover. The woofer inputs still pass through the LPF, and mid/tweeter through the HPF, so you are not removing the crossover by bi-amping unless you dig inside the box. You are not wrong, but most folk are not going to remove the speaker's factory, internal, passive crossover IME.
Magnepans are NOT electrostats and typically have a flat 4 ohm impedance. They are best driven by an amp whose power output doubled into 4 ohms. Many amps limit output into 4 ohms.
