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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.

128x128donavabdear

I do not buy Active speakers.  Sorry.  The active part gets broken well before the speakers do, and often the expense pushes them into the parts bin. Also, the majority of "Active" speakers are powered with cheap D-Class amps that don't work very well.  I might change my mind if the active speakers come with replaceable amplifiers that can be upgraded.

@big_green_jelly_bean 

Bryston has active speakers with an outboard crossover so you can use any amp you like. Best of both worlds. 

 

@donavabdear

this opens up the ability for the amps to drive the drivers differently at low levels among other things.

 

The information linked is not stating different operation at low levels. It is stating that the analog portions of the active circuit use low signal levels as opposed to "speaker" levels. 

w.r.t. Using the Genelec software, don't you have the Lyngdorf incorporated in your Genelec system? GLM Grade will have better tools for analysis of individual speakers allowing you to better tune their position and if you incorporate acoustics, allow you to measure and tune those as well.  However, you need to pick whether the GLM software or Lyngdorf is going to do the room correction including timing and level.

 

Ya, I don't know why I didn't think of crossovers as moving and changing per impedance, frequency, amplitude.

Well they better change with frequency and impedance or they would not work :-). Much of the work in driver design the last decades has been to ensure linearity w.r.t. voltage so this is not as much of an issue as previously, but see my points previously w.r.t. linearity. Moving the crossover to the signal domain whether digital or analog solves the issues of non linearity of the driver interacting with the crossover, but not the inherent linearity issue. Many of Genelec points, point to the greater ease, flexibility, and consistency possible with an active design.

You also have the issue of the driver parameters changing with time as they heat and cool. This is more important for professional speakers as they are more likely to run at high levels for extended periods, but as @lonemountain stated, that market is not resistant to active speakers.

 

@thespeakerdude So best practices in hi fidelity sound systems should be adaptive in a more complete way.

  • Each driver has its own signal processing and power amplifier. This isolates each driver from the drive signals handled by the other drivers, reducing inter-modulation distortion and overdriving problems.

Assuming the latency in the processing is the same in each circuit it would be foolish to not be able to adaptively based on signal parameters to optimize the handshake between the amp and the driver variably. I could see how that circuit could really cause problems if Genelecs were integrated into any other speaker systems, variable latency would be impossible to keep phase in the entire system.

I think "the ones" are variable because each amp has its own DSP why do that if the crossovers are ridged? You could be right because there are many studios that are upgrading to "the ones" along with older speakers so if there is onboard variable crossovers seems like there would be a warning in the manual, which there isn’t . I temporarily set up my speakers analog because I didn’t know how good the D to A converters were but since there is already A to D converters within each amp 3 it is foolish to give these speakers an analog signal. I use the MTRX processor on protools so the signal would stay totally digital all the way through the system with only one change at the speakers.

This brings up another problem I often fight with and that is with so many onboard digital plugins such as EQ, comps. bass processors, reverbs, and spacial effects how can the signal stay pure so the final D to A conversion even has a chance to keep the signal coherent? I suppose it would be easy to record 3 sign waves in the middle of each driver frequency range, process them with lots of digital plugins and see if a good sign wave comes out the other end, I have a feeling it won’t, should be fun.

@thespeakerdude

Also I wanted to ask you, with DSP incorporated into each amp that is connected to each driver of course we are only using the term crossover in a generic way because of course there would be no need for a crossover at all, im just saying crossover as meaning the window of frequencies going to a particular driver.