Thoughts on Active/Passive Speakers? Looking for pros and cons.

There is a lot of misinformation in this thread. Fiesta 75 has it pretty close, active means "amplifiers AFTER the crossover connected directly to the driver". Nothing about digital, or analog or amps inside or outside.

If you see how much copper is in the passive crossover, then how much speaker wire is added on to that, with all of it between the driver and the amp, its hard to imagine how someone would view active as more complex. The amplifier cannot "see" the driver at all, it sees a crossover and speaker wire.

You cannot adjust driver phase in a passive crossover system- probably one of the single most important issues (a phase linear loudspeaker).

To argue that you someone is "taking away your options to switch amplifiers" is to ignore how much active is increasing the importance of the front end, the improved transparency in EVERYTHING before the speaker input. The amp, while important, is only one of many things that influence sound quality.  To hear a significantly bigger difference in tonearms, cartridges, phono preamps, streamers, CD players, preamplifiers and cable between all those elements is the benefit of active.

The experts in active where the first two players: Genelec and ATC. They’ve been after this idea with real commercially available product since early 80s.  Look to technical research and white papers written by both.

Brad

While nearly everyone in this hobby admits that the cable makes a difference everywhere it is used in the system, how is it that here, between amp and driver, it doesnt make any difference? Isnt that up there with all cable sounds the same and all amps sound the same? Isnt a passive crossover a whole bunch of cable PLUS a lot of other stuff in the audio path?

Brad

pragmas: signal processing at speaker level is a WHOLE different animal than at line level. Heat is the lowest issue compared to the rest of the losses and lack of phase control. Have you seen a proper passive crossover, how much copper is involved in air core inductors etc?  Should I post a picture of a good 3 way passive crossover so you can see?

It is NOT a disadvantage for seperate amp for each driver: active means its possible to provide the right power for each driver for matched dynamics acoss all the drivers. With seperate amps, a big peak in the bass does not raise distortion on the tweeter or midrange as it does with one amp. The cost of a big power supply and transformer for one big amp can be much more difficult and expensive to execute than two or three smaller amps.

Of course the manufacturer needs to do a good job with active- this is true of everything. It is true that active can be done cheap- especially using little Class D amp modules available everywhere now (95% of which sound awful).

IN the case I am very familiar with , ATC, the electronics are all analogue. ATC avoids digital for that changes too much too often and better to chose your own converters.

Whether analogue or digital designs, that has nothing to do with active vs passive.

Pragmas
I actually misread your post. I thought you said a passive crossover works at low voltage, and the rest was in support of that. My mistake and I apologize.
Brad.