Active Speakers Don't Sound Better

You will not understand this and I draw your attention to you claiming, in a previous discussion with you, that if a bigger inductor of the same value replaces the original in a passive XO then the lower resistance of the new bigger inductor should have a resistor placed in series with it to achieve the same overall DCR. This illustrates an inability to grasp the basics. Nobody does this with the rare exception of designing the XO specifically for a low damping factor tube amp.

What a rant, @lemonhaze - Are you miller carbon? Cause let me tell you, he also couldn’t let go of anything. He’d also interject nonsequiturs and personal attacks out of nowhere, just like here. I used to send him some coconut butter so he could apply it to the parts that hurt on a regular basis. I’d send him to a therapist too but that seemed like a waste of money.

Also, you are simply plain wrong about speaker design, and if you’d actually spend any time sweating the details of a crossover you wouldn’t be making such silly statements. I suggest you actually go design a few passive speakers and then come back, but you won't do that because this is clearly personal and not technical.  Boo hoo. 

PS - I don’t set myself up as a guru, just a hobbyist.

This is why active speakers better have volume control AFTER digital crossover or be fully analogue.

I don't know any other way to do it.  An inherent feature in any active crossover is level matching, or the ability to set the gain differently for each driver due to normal differences in efficiencies. 

@steve59 To be fair, much of that is the room.  A well treated dealer room is not going to sound like your average living room.

I think @prof best summarized what I was trying to say at the beginning:

Whatever the technical advantages in active designs,

I’ve yet to hear a paradigm changing moment, listening to an active design.

At the end of the day the active or passive speaker is an amalgam of all the choices made between the listener and the preamp but for the home there's no big paradigm shift in perceived sound quality due to the use of active or passive alone. 

Given that, I'll take simplicity and value as significant value indicators. 

Active loudspeakers have widespread use in pro audio. If they didn't sound good I doubt they would be used as much if at all.

@bottomzone  Absolutely true.  Active crossovers offer significant benefits in power efficiency that is much more important for megawatt installations than modest home speakers though, so pros are much more heavily invested in active configurations.  In the home we can afford to waste some watts for level matching, etc.

I hear a lot of comments about vibration, and while I have had equipment that was subject to microphonics, that was in the late 1980s and probably because of the use of very cheap ceramic capacitors. I think that overall, outside of tubes and turntables, the subjects is a bogey man without a shred of evidence. It’s a real shame because honestly it’s super easy to test for. I mean, super easy. And I’ve yet to see anyone produce a credible study that vibrations or isolation of solid state gear matters.

Please put me down as a complete skeptic until someone has any sort of study showing any piece of solid state gear has microphonics.  I'm definitely not going to worry about a separate enclosure housing  an amp.

@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. 

My listening trends lately have been a lot more about movies than music though, so as I transition to more active speakers I'm interested in minimizing devices and cables as much as I can. 

BTW, I want to point out that the plate amplifier in my center is in a sealed sub-compartment.  The simple box-shape actually has 3 separate chambers:

1. Woofers
2. Mid/tweeter chamber
3. Plate amplifier

All quite sturdy.  The amplifier is not directly subjected to the woofer's output, nor is the midrange or tweeter. 

The tweeter itself shares the space with the midrange but it is a closed-back design.

I do want to point out that as the builder of an active, 3-way speaker I can point out a number of ways in which this is a technically superior speaker vs. what I would have made as a passive version. Also that my workflow is so much simpler I’ll probably never design or build a passive speaker again.

As others have pointed out, there are a number of power efficiency problems greatly improved upon by using an active design. Those are some of the ways in which I can point to this speaker having better specs. At the same time, in a home where 10 watts is a lot, I may never hear it.

What it did not do was actually "sound better" within my modest volume requirements in my small living room. It did not say "I’m so much better than every other speaker in this room." What it does say is "I’m so much better for this living room than a lot of other designs" which is what I wanted and why I bothered to take the effort to build it. Among those requirements was introducing no more devices. I wanted to swap my previous passive, 2-way center for a powered 3-way, not add 3 more amplifiers, a 3-way crossover and a center.

Well, I know that you like to say provocative things to start a discussion Erik

How rude and completely uncalled for! I’m absolutely shocked they’d allow gambling in this casino.... 🤣

but of course your experience with this one speaker doesn’t make it a universal truth. It was demonstrated for me some years ago at an ATC dealer in Connecticut that their active speakers sound subjectively better than when passively driven.

I’ll argue that you heard ATC speakers that were better active than passive... and that you are extrapolating a universal truth from that which did not hold up for me.

Let me clarify my original point somewhat. I’m not backpedaling, but clarifying. Based on my experience, the mere conversion of a speaker from passive to active, or design of a speaker as active does not automatically make it better sounding in a meaningful way.

That is, if I were to take an existing speaker design, map the voltage transfer functions from the passive crossover to the active crossover with precision I’d end up with an equally good or bad sounding speaker.

I know engineers, they love to change things - Dr. McCoy

And here’s the issue. The features available in DSP crossovers are vast and tempting. Even with the exact same box and drivers you almost never design the same crossover from one to the other. The economics of part costs and engineering effort needed upend what a good engineer will see as possible and you almost never get to hear a true apples to apples comparisons.

The point is, I can believe you heard two similar ATC speakers. I also believe the reproduction from the active speaker won you over. What I don’t know is all the differences that wend under the hood. Crossover points, slopes, time alignment, driver equalization, etc could all be different and so for me this is no longer a fair comparison.

I will repeat though that using DSP/active configuration gives me a lot more features available to incorporate in my design, and I can be very happy with the results but also not able to say "active is always going to sound better" because I don’t believe that to be true.