Active studio monitors anyone?


Due to the unavailability of a full size Man Room and a sub par Living Room area I have started to seriously consider Active Studio Monitors as my listening room will be in a converted Office that are so prevalent in the newer Suburban House Floorplan.  There seems to be MANY benefits in going active monitors set up in the near field to mid field. Active DSP, No passive crossovers, Plenty of room acoustic adjustments, some with onboard DACS, Some full digital domain till it reaches the drivers, Near full range And ruler flat responses. I have narrowed it down to a few that fit my needs and would greatly reduce the boxes and expense. A good streamer, optional DAC and Pre with active monitors would be the whole kit.

One Im looking at are APS Klasik which will be coming out with a HiFi model of the Klasik Studio Monitor differing by a vinyl or wood wrap of your choice, stand by power on/off, and Grill covers. This is highly regarded for Mixing and MAstering it also looks more like a hifi speaker than a monitor.

Nubert Nupro A300 which look great and is fully digital to the drivers so a high end streamer and the speakers would be the whole system. 

A few from Focal and Dynaudio 

Presonus Sceptre s8 has a great DSP and a Coaxial.

These are just the highly regarded less than 2K offerings and many like the EVENT OPAL, Focal Trio, neumans, ATC and Geithain would be something to look at on the high end if it really works out and even those would be bargains considering how much you would be saving in amps, high end cables, ect.
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"It is clear that advocates of active speakers have no valid audiophile argument"

Some active monitors (focal sm9) have the divers directly coupled to the amps and the crossover is before the amps. This has many advantages that I am too lazy to right about on my phone. 

We could then go into why active crossovers are better than passive...


The explanation is obvious:

Whether or not active monitors sound better, the audiophile will always prefer passive monitors.

This way, you also get to obsess over the choice of an amplifier, or even two of them in the case of mono-blocks.


@cwlondon Not to mention obsessing over speaker wire/cable/whatever, interconnects unbalanced/balanced 10-9s OFHC, and of course the preamp. Myself, I don’t even use a preamp. Same as the fellow referenced by bob_reynolds, I have for years used a Mytek DAC, which supports 4 digital inputs and has a volume control pot built in. It directly drives my PSI, and before that Focal, monitors and sub. Balanced interconnects by Monoprice (which I compared to several others, and they’re as good as Mogami, Canare, Monster & the like). Clean!

To wit, active studio monitors are indeed less "fun." They’re no nonsense high value tools designed and built for audio professionals who usually have better and more profitable things to do than constantly tweak their monitoring system. Instead, professionals get to know what they have, thoroughly, and how best to work with it. They then get on with the job.
Man those psi floorstanders look the business and would be a perfect audiophile crossover product. Pretty expensive though