@o_holter wrote:
I have not tried top of the line active speakers. Only mid level and below. But my experience is this: take the ’passive’ speaker from a pair of active speakers. Instead of the output from the amp in the active speaker, give it the output of a good amp (in my case, the amp in my main rig).
Result - to my ears, it usually sounds much better! So I am sad, reconnecting it to the so-so amp in the other speaker.
Comment?
What’re the technicalities of your experience/experiment here? I mean, what do you do filter-wise with the active speakers once you’ve stripped them to a passive state - fit them with passive crossovers between the amp and drivers instead, or use the existing DSP and then combine it with your own external amp + 2 more amp channels if it’s a 2-way design?
Let’s say it’s a 2-way speaker you’d want to keep actively configured, then you would need to add another of your preferred stereo amp (one for each driver section), somehow use the existing DSP and your once active speaker with built-in amps and DSP has now been retrofitted by-passing their internal amps and re-configured actively with amps of your choosing. Is that the way of it?
@erik_squires wrote:
@o_holter
You make exactly the right argument for an external, active crossover. If you want to roll your own amps you can’t do this with a fully active speaker design.
Wrong. A fully active speaker design can be done fitting it all into the speaker as well as having the amps and DSP external to it. Semantically you wouldn’t call the latter an active speaker per se because its amp and DSP components are external to it, but insofar the crossover function via the DSP is done prior to the amplification on signal level (and they’re no passive crossover parts between the amps and drivers) and the respective amp channel are connected directly to their driver sections, it’s a fully actively configured speaker design. Period, end of f*cking story.
Fully actively one can use any external amp one sees fit, as long as you have enough of them to cover the respective driver sections. You would of course need an external DSP as well (again: prior to amplification on signal level, and sans passive XO parts for it to be called fully active), the real challenge being setting filter values - certainly if they’re done on your own. Or, a manufacturer could set the filter values just as they would, basically, a passive crossover - like ATC (electronic, analogue XO), Bryston, Sanders Sound, JBL etc. - and provide them as part of the design one way of the other. The ATC SCM300 Pro ASL’s, and others, have power amps and electronic XO/DSP external to the speakers, but that doesn’t make them any less actively configured.