The Truth about Modern Class D

Which do you think would sound better:

• a really excellent class A/B amp hooked up with super expensive speaker cables to a classic speaker with a passive crossover network or,
• three very good class D amps hooked directly to three excellent drivers and being fed from a DSP crossover with included room correction?

The first choice is the Audio System of the Dinosaurs, and the second choice is the Audio System of the Future.

The continued development of quality class D amplifiers has opened up the possibility of dedicating an amplifier to each driver in a speaker. The continued development of DSP and associated software has opened up a way to tailor crossovers, equalization, and phase response to specific drivers and speakers and the room they are playing in.

CD transports, DACs, preamps, interconnects, separate amplifiers and speaker cables will all be obsolete in five years. They are the Dinosaurs of Audio left over from 1958 technology.

The future of Audio is visible in the KEF LS50 Wireless, which does away with everything but an active speaker with a DAC and connectivity. Make the speaker bigger, with better bass, and add DSP room correction software, and you have the audiophile system of the future.

One of the most difficult problems of speaker design is the crossover. DSP and active speaker technology is affordable and solves that problem. The biggest problem for today’s audiophile is speaker/room integration. DSP room correction solves that problem.

Will you encase your Dinosaur audio technology in amber and stride confidently towards the future, or will you wrap yourself in $10,000 speaker cables and yell "Over my dead body!!"?

@1graber2

But that will be more of a commercial product in the future than an audiophile product.... Severely limited in many respects. Sound. Precision. Pray. Musicality. Power. Nuance.

There is no reason an active speaker cannot be an audiophile grade product. We are at the beginning of this technology. There is Dynaudio, Genelec, Kii, KEF and very few others. I believe I saw an interview with Andrew Jones where he said ELAC is working on an active speaker, and the new PS Audio AN speakers will be partially active. Of course, the best Pro monitor speakers have been active units for almost 20 years. This technology will rapidly improve. And not only is there no reason that active speakers can’t be audiophile grade, they allow elimination of passive crossovers and the adoption of DSP crossovers which can provide much better sound -- offering solutions to driver equaliztion and speaker time alignment as well as room correction that you can’t get any other way. Not only will active speakers with DSP achieve audiophile quality, they will set the bar for the highest quality.

And my 2nd point? Well, there is no damn fun if the system and speaker do everything for you. Again, that is a commercial product, not an audiophile product. If DSP is going to do everything for you, then you don’t learn anything about how the sound waves and sound effects can be managed in your room with your own knowledge and know-how. Boring.

I can’t argue with that. I bought my last preamp in 1982, and my last amplifier in 1989. Since 1990 I have owned three DACs, but until recently the same pair of speakers over that span, and no exotic power cords or fancy speaker wire. (But I have bought a ton of music). If your enjoyment of this hobby comes from flipping equipment in search of synergy and nirvana, you probably won’t be that interested in active speakers. But if you are more interested in actually achieving synergistic audio nirvana, why not join the future and let the manufacturer do it right?

And to finish and anchor these musings in this thread, Class D amplifiers are one of the main technologies that are enabling the next generation of active speakers.