Powered speakers show audiophiles are confused


17 of 23 speakers in my studio and home theater systems are internally powered. My studio system is all Genelec and sounds very accurate. I know the best new concert and studio speakers are internally powered there are great technical reasons to design a speaker and an amp synergistically, this concept is much more important to sound quality than the vibration systems we often buy. How can an audiophile justify a vibration system of any sort with this in mind.

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Genelecs are super accurate and sound really good for studio music creation or cinema, but for audiophile home music listening they sound bit too clinical and chiseled for my taste. My guess is it's most likely due to the Class D amps that drive them.

I don't mind active or powered speakers, but my last set of actives had failed amps on both speakers. Now I had no speakers or amps working correctly. Great that they were under warranty and such but I'd rather not be out everything for at home relaxing.

 

kenjit
You asked about how an amp can be designed toward a particular speakers driver. As I'm sure you know impedance changes due to frequency, a very low frequency signal at a loud volume creates a low impedance. Not all amps are designed to be a one size fits all answer. Sub amps have dozens of signal filters to try to match the signal to the amplifier, a compromise of the music, and low frequency amps are the easiest to design because they only have to deal with a very small frequency range. The reason why every sound system needs a sub is because amps can't be all things to all speakers but an amp designed for low impedance loads can do a better job than and amp designed for 10Khz. The perfect speaker would have an amp for every frequency but 15 thousand amps in our living rooms is a little much. Matching a curve is very hard and if music was a sign wave it would be easier but music is very complex and impedance and many other factors in a music signal reproduction show themselves to amps at the same time which makes amplifying those signals a compromise when heard on the speaker. Amps that are at least designed to amplify the best guesses of the complex signals created by recordings in a narrow frequency band are better than brute force amps that are huge and can handle a .5 ohm load created by a synth but can't at the same time reproduce the triangle. This is why no matter how expensive the speaker and amplifier it never sounds like a real instrument. 


Once I was mixing an orchestra at a church and the conductor asked a violinist with a Stradivarius to come and play for me at the mixing console, well she did and tears came to my eyes the sound was so beautiful, I've never heard a recording half that good.

My experience with studio monitors is that they are very neutral and extremely accurate. The downside is that (FOR ME) they sound boring and very fatiguing in the long run. Too pushy.