Pros and Cons of built-in amps?

You know, you can get all the benefits and none of the downsides of active speakers in other ways - either an active crossover or no crossover.

The big problem with active speakers is that any one that has decent bass response is going to be shaking the crap out of its amps. That is, you know, real bad for sonics.

Usarrn,

The thing is those vibration sources can be and typically are taken care of. That's why we spend money on good racks and isolation platforms.

You certainly are not going to "detect" obvious things like doppler distortion or obvious effects of vibration, but they are going to be there, as anybody who's ever experimented with vibration control will tell you. It tends to affect about everything.

Inside the speaker itself is going to be the worst source of vibration. Even moving the crossover outside of the speaker pays dividends, which is why some manufacturers do it, and now we're just talking about a few caps and coils.

There's nothing at all wrong with active speakers, but the point is they come with trade-offs, like most things in audio. They're not, IMO, a stroke of genius and not the wave of the future. All of this also assumes that you buy into the mantra that digital amps are "just fine" and amplifiers don't really having any bearing on sound quality.

If you happen to be into open baffles, it's not so easy to make them active anyway. :) Well, there's duck tape...

Anybody who does not hear diffrences between a SET amp (any one) and any class A or AB solid-state amp is either:

1) Listening to a very unresolving system.

2) Using the SET on inappropriate speakers (in which case it should still sound different, but bad).

3) Listening to very poorly recorded music.

4) Not listening carefully.

5) Does indeed have poor hearing or at least is poorly acquainted with the sound of live, unamplified acoustic music/vocals.

6) More than one of the above.

I will go far enough as to say this is a statement of fact. It certainly isn't intended to be inflammatory or personally degrading to anyone.

I would also say that the quality of the SET here is not too paramount as the poor quality ones will have problems - like rolled-off extremes or noise - that should still be *audible*, and will still have much or most of the characteristic single-ended tube sound.

I have listened to some push-pull tube amps *with moderate feedback* that do sound A LOT like a typical push-pull solid-state amp, but single-ended tubes with little to no feedback are quite another thing.