I Was Considering Active, Then I Watched This ...

I'm not saying that all speakers and all amps are similar sounding, at all.

I'm just saying that coming to some universal truth about the desirability of an active vs. passive speaker in the home is never going to happen.

Staying in the topic of practical differences between active and passive speakers for the home, I want to talk a little more about my most recent experience.

I have conventional 2-way L and R speakers. I’ve added a 3-way active speaker in the center. The mid-woofers are practically the same but the center uses a different and very highly regarded mid and tweeter. More suitable for the location.

The use of a 3-way amplifier with 50 + 125 + 125 watt sections means I have a theoretical dynamic range of around 1,000 watts. That’s a lot more than my modest Luxman integrated (100W/ch) especially given the losses in the passive crossover due to tweeter/woofer level matching.  Honestly, 20W peaks are VERY LOUD in my home.

So you’d think the center channel blows away the L and R? It does not. It does not sound more dynamic, or louder. It integrates perfectly. What I do get is a fuller bass thanks to having larger woofers than my previous center, and excellent off-axis coverage thanks to the 3-way design, high order crossover and digital time alignment.

What’s my point? That in homes the dynamic range and power calculus often won’t matter to you. Buy what you like and is more convenient.

@phusis  Thanks, but in the interest of staying with the OP's topic, I'm NOT discussing the use of external crossovers and amps. 

Not only was that not mentioned in his post, but the use of active crossovers and external amps in the home is probably the very rarest of beasts.  I'll happily engage in that topic elsewhere.

I read somewhat of a misconception.

Having an active speaker which uses DSP doesn’t necessarily mean it allows for room correction.

A manufacturer may take advantage of DSP for the crossover, like you would an active speaker, replacing the caps and coils, but not necessarily allow for end user adjustments.

Even before DSP however, pro speakers often had bass level adjustments to let you move a speaker from free field to desktop, or near-wall.

As some may know, I’m an avid DIYer when it comes to speakers. I’ve built both passive and active and worked with pro sound speakers in theaters. I am ambivalent. That is, I have two strong opinions about each being a good choice.

Without getting too much into the alleged technical merits of each design, the thing that passive speakers give me is the ability to chose a very colorful amplifier. Consider my favorite amps of all time are CJ Premiere 12s. I don’t consider them neutral, but rather juicy, colorful liars. Heaven.

I just built a fully active, DSP driven center channel. What did I get? Excellent off-axis frequency response and massive dynamic range (comparable to ATC’s claimed figures) in a compact package along with objectively neutral frequency response which doesn’t mind being on a shelf while avoiding the need for yet another amplifier in my rack. Much as I love my Luxman integrated, I keep asking myself if I wouldn’t rather make 2 more active speakers and reduce my combined HT/stereo setup to 1 processor instead.

If you really want to pick your amp, go with passive. If you want to pick a speaker and not have to worry about your amp, go with active, but in no case should you pick speaker A over speaker B based on which of these types they are.

In the consumer world there are a lot of benefits to active speakers we may not care about. Dynamic range and power loss for instance. In the pro world we need every watt, and active crossovers deliver that. In the home world we are fine losing many DB’s of output due to massively overbought amps. 😀 That is, I can point to some technical benefits of active crossovers/speakers which are true, but perhaps irrelevant?

As a consumer, do you really care that building a DSP crossover is much easier (not easy!) than passive, since we aren't swapping parts in and out during the prototype phase?  Not really.  Does the digital time delay and off-axis frequency response matter to you?  Most passive speakers do an excellent job with horizontal dispersion.  The center I built though needed excellent vertical as well as horizontal dispersion, and that's a feature I could only really consider in active/DSP configuration.  Point is, a lot of the technical differences vanish for most of us.

Should also point out that we are doing a lot of this when we add an active subwoofer with crossover, but in this case most speakers dont' have a high pass filter (YG being one very weird exception) at the crossover slope.

I don’t understand why you need a speaker manufacturer to build an active speaker, when you can make a lot of speakers active with an active crossover and your choice of amps.

Um, kind of sort of, but not fully. There are a couple of things you are missing:

1 - Crossovers are more than Hz and slope. They also have EQ features and level matching.
2 - You have to remove the internal crossover to achieve all the benefits of an active speaker system, especially higher efficiency.

Consider for instance that most tweeters are padded down because they tend to have a higher sensitivity than their mid/woofer counter parts. That is, there are resistors in there which are converting power to heat. If you remove them, then there’s no such waste.

Next, your external crossover is additive, not in place of the existing crossover and slope, so things get complicated. Now instead of 1 high-pass filter, and 1 low pass filter you have 2 of each.

So, if you do remove the internal crossover, you will also have to make up for any EQ that was built in.

I mean, it’s not a completely useless idea to use an external crossover on a speaker designed to be bi-wired or bi-amped, but it’s also not the same as a fully active system.

@high-amp

I would love to see Fritz try a 2.5 or 3 way model with his drivers and materials, but I don’t want to put the poor guy on the hook for my dumb ass ideas. ;-)

Best,

Erik

OK folks. Listen up. Here’s WHY active crossovers are so very much better than passive.

... Except when they are not.

A single loudspeaker driver is an inductor, and provides a frequency dependent,

the fact that there are multiple impedance peaks in most driver’s impedance curve should give us a clue that they are not electrically a simple inductors but an inductor, plus a resistor plus a resonant circuit.

But do please go on...

give you a frequency dependent impedance curve which looks like a Coney Island roller coaster. And that’s just for a tweeter high-pass circuit.

So, without taking this much further, almost any competent SS amplifier will handle these impedance issues. Please look at the simulated speaker load curve in any Stereophile amp review. Even for tubes, it’s not that bad.

Some speakers, like << PLUG!! >> Fritz << /PLUG! >> are naturally a lot better than others and will behave very very well even for modest tube gear.  Joseph Audio is another brand that seems to take impedance flattening seriously.

Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not arguing that you cannot make an exceptional active crossover, but these arguments have for the most part been overcome by modern, low output impedance amps.

I’ve heard TERRIBLE fully active systems, and I’ve heard sublime traditional systems.



Best,


Erik

@duckworp

Yeah, setting up a good sounding room curve is hard work.  Lots of ARC systems out there and only a few IMHO get it right.  Toole doesn't really like any of them, but I think a couple like Anthem and Dirac and JL Audio have come along in making better choices.

People still don't understand that automatic room correction does what a human told it to do, and you might not like that. :)

Best,

Erik

The eternal debate about active vs. passive speakers is exactly that, an eternal debate.

The truth:

Pros and cons are complicated. Only in the consumer land the raging debate tends to exist only because there just isn’t that much of a difference for us in terms of class of product.

In the end, the quality of the sound we experience is really complicated and the final result is the only way to compare two choices, and for that you need to get very specific.

I can imagine that there’s some future where two speakers sit in my living room, with no cables, no power supply, no amplifiers and are quantum linked directly to a performer’s recorded brainwaves. I’m literally going to buy a hologram of an integrated amplifier before I enjoy that experience. :)


Best,

Erik