Go Active Crossover or Upgrade existing XOs?

Listen fellas, its not just a river in Egypt, okay?

Still waiting to hear, if its so great, why all the world’s greatest cost no object systems aren’t doing it?

I mean, its not like there’s some vast audiophile industrial complex conspiracy to... Oh wait, what’s this?

There has been a long running conspiracy to prevent blah blah yada yada

Gadios, 

My experience: I've gone active and very happy. In my experience, given a certain (limited) budget, I've gotten better sound by optimizing: focus on an audiophile PC as sole front end, run digital crossovers, a multichannel DAC, keep my tube amp for mids/treble, and a cheap Hypex UcD amp for mid bass and Rythmik subs for lowest frequencies. The tradeoff: steep learning curve, VERY involved vs just plugging an amp to speakers with passive xo. The biggest trick is building your own active speakers and selling your existing speakers with the expensive passive xo. 

I suggest you do a lot of reading before deciding. Search in computeraudiophile a couple of articles named Acourate walkthrough, and advanced Acourate (or something along the lines) to learn how digital active xo could be implemented. 

I hope this helps. 

I had bi-amped my JBL 4333’s which were originally designed with a bi-amp crossover (though I had built my own crossover using Nelson Pass design for mid/hi and used a Rane active to separate the low frequencies for my woofer). I used vintage amps with solid-state MAC 1750 on bottom and Dynaco tube on top. I thought it sounded good until my tube top end went out and I thought it was cheaper to just finish the passive crossover for the woofer Than repair my Dynaco. Wow!  So much better with just the Mac powering everything. 
Granted, I was using less-than-state-of-the-art equipment and I bet it would have sounded great if I had the flexibility to try multiple amps top and bottom until I found the perfect combo. But that would be a lot of money and a lot of experimentation. 
If you’ve got the time and money, it can be fun to tweak, but for me, simplifying by getting rid of all the unnecessary hardware in the signal path gave me a much better sound. And Nelson Pass designs a pretty good passive crossover too. 🤓

My general answer to this would be: If it is a 1.st order filter, upgrade it, if it is 2.order or moore skip it and go active. 

gadios

Go Active Crossover or Upgrade existing XOs?

It was recently suggested to me that rather than doing a crossover upgrade

I look into an active crossover for my Tannoy FSMs.

I tried With my ML Monoliths+plasma’s to have active xover on the ESL/plasma and active xover on the bass.
Even with very expensive active xovers on the ESL/plasma it still didn’t sound as good as the well made passive it came with, just sounded sterile with a slight lack of body and warmth.
But the bass was better with the active, rather than passive.
So I had 18db high pass 180hz> passive for the ESL/plasma and 24db low pass discrete active 180hz< for the bass.

BTW: I even tried doing it all digitally and it was even more sterile on the ESL/plasma almost like missing harmonic structure, surgical would be a good call.

Cheers George