So you got rid of the passive crossover? What did you wire up the drivers with? zipcord?
BTW, I agree with you that the acoustic treatment of the room and speaker placement have the biggest impact on sound quality. Having said that, cables are still very important contributors to sound quality.
Only the LPF for the woofers was bypassed. This filter is behind the top woofer and it's connected to the binding posts on the back of the speaker with the same type of zip cord that is connecting all the drivers and crossover components in the R1.
The procedure to modify the R1s was to remove the top woofer, cut the zip cord coming into the LPF, cut the pair of zip cords coming out of the LPF to each woofer, and splicing the cables to the binding posts and the woofers together, making sure the correct polarity is observed (a bit tricky because the zip cord does not have polarity indicators).
No wiring was added or removed, but the end result is that the binding posts on the back of the speaker for the woofers are now internally connected directly to the woofers with the stock LPF is out of the circuit, but the stock passive HPF for the coax is intact. Reversing the procedure very simple.
Andrew Jones was able to develop a set of slopes in the Pass XVR1 crossover such that we could keep the coax's passive HPF in the TADs intact, while also adding additional high pass filters for the coax using the HPF in the XVR1. As such the coax now rolls off at a steeper slope. The LPF of the Pass XVR1 drives the amplifiers that drive the woofers. And this was done in a way so the acoustic output of the coax sums correctly with that of the woofers. Not something I would ever attempt to do without Andrew Jones's help.
We were lucky that this worked out with the drivers summing correctly. This is a hybrid set up. The woofer is fully active. The coax still has the passive filter in the TAD AND also HPFs in the XVR1 so it "see less bass signal". This opens up the midrange a bit.
I've measured the speaker near field and the transition from the woofers to the coax is very smooth. And the woofers sound great wired directly to the amplifiers.
Could someone now using more modern drivers make a better speaker than my biamped R1? Probably. Could Andrew update and improve the coax he designed 20 years ago with what he's learned over 20 years? Certainly. But the goal here was to optimize the R1 with the stock, 20 year old coax design, while keeping Andrew's sound signature. And at least to my ears, we succeeded.
But since this is a thread about cables, and not about how to biamp a speaker... the cables in my R1s are stock 14 gauge OFC zip cord. The cables connecting my R1s to the four ABH2 amps (in mono) are 6 foot Canare Star Quad cable, terminated by Benchmark. And there is a box in my attic of fancy cables that made rather minor differences in my system.