Active vs. Passive - Crossover differences
I stumbled across this via LinkedIn (of all places) today and thought it would make an excellent article to share. Seas has released application notes to use their latest high tech coaxial driver in a DIY form. At ~ $570 US they aren’t exactly cheap, but they’d make an affordable small surround speaker.
Even if you are not a DIYer, but you are often curious about how active and passive crossovers can be different this article shows you both approaches. As I have written before, even when taking exactly the same parts once you have DSP capabilities you start making different choices in your crossover design.
The DSP version has a number of EQ filters added not directly present in the passive version, making for subtle changes in the response of the woofer and tweeter not to mention some digital delay being used on the woofer to get accurate phase alignment.
It is easiest to compare the final frequency response near the bottom first.
Honestly the two designs follow each other closely, but if it was me I'd absolutely be tempted to use an LR4 crossover on the active version.