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Active or passive, does it matter?

I wasnt sitting in a null , I have a large 11m x 7.5m dedicated room and no matter where I sat or put the speakers , the ATCs sounded bass light... maybe I was expecting too much , the speakers I had (and still have) before the ATCs' were a pair of meridian DSP5500's , also active but with 4x 8" woofers....
At the time I had also bought a TACT RCS2.0... I had it in my mind that the ATCs and the TACT Room correction was the magic bullet that would make it all sound glorious - never happened :)

Even now , with a Dspeaker antimode bass correction or my OpenDRC minidsp Room correction , you have to overlay a house curve on the results as they try to make it "flat" at listening position , flat at listening position sounds lousy.. thin and reedy and too bright.
Currently I have 8x 8" woofers (DSP6000's) and 2 x 13.5" SVS woofers with a total of around 3kw amp power doing duty for "bass".....
 
Rodney gold said:
The reason for providing a bass lift with some accurate speakers is because the most pleasing FR curve at listening position has a bass lift (often called a house curve) and a treble droop.
I found my SCM50a's extremely and surprisingly bass light in a good room , mine had no provision for lifting bass at all (didnt see the holes)

Here is the "ideal" curve

bandk.jpg
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Where is the bass lifting? I can see a roll off in treble which follows from the power response of normal speakers.
 
mudlark said:
B and K obviously had some crappy distorting and screechy hi-fi system....
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Here is my favourite record producer listening to his B&K model 35s

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Experience has told me to not sweat over passive vs active, if it works it works.
 
Ps apologies for the gear porn. I get twitchy around audiophiles, DIYers and so on wielding graphs and spectrograms,you are, to put it mildly, rather dangerous with them.
 
The B&K curve is based on subjective testing. it follows roughly the -1dB/oct above 200hz falling response 'ideal' as recommended/researched by Toole/Edgar/Olive amongst others.
 
Fox said:
Here is my favourite record producer listening to his B&K model 35s

ve2epu9e.jpg


Experience has told me to not sweat over passive vs active, if it works it works.
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Not exactly an idea listening experience. What's the rationale? If music sounds good on this crap and in this room it will sound great in a punter's lounge?
 
The picture doesn't show mixing, just listening and isn't "normal" at all, surely?

You can't be suggesting that the setup is any good at all except for casual dipping into music.
 
mudlark said:
Not exactly an idea listening experience. What's the rationale? If music sounds good on this crap and in this room it will sound great in a punter's lounge?
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In my day it was usually Auratone 5Cs:

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A little sealed full-range 5" box that sat on the meter bridge to give an idea of what a mix sounded like on a radio, in the car, on a cheap small stereo etc. They played a very important role as it's surprisingly easy to get a great mix on the huge Tannoy main-monitors or whatever where the bass sounds great but vanishes in it's entirety on little speakers such as these. Auratones seem to have been forgotten over the years and the NS10 became the common meter-bridge speaker. A far more revealing box, but still bandwidth-limited and I guess not to dissimilar to what folk hear in the car or via TV these days. I bet headphones / earbuds are used a lot for cross-referencing now too given their popularity in the marketplace.
 
mudlark said:
The picture doesn't show mixing, just listening and isn't "normal" at all, surely?

You can't be suggesting that the setup is any good at all except for casual dipping into music.
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Yes I can, and it is a perfectly fit for purpose set of devices.

Production is a chimera, some folk here have very set ideas about what production means (mixing in the subtext of the above quote: ergo no mixing= no production), production is informed listening and informed response and informed change (be it additive or subtractive). Nothing more nothing less.
 
I think we differ somewhat here.

It's also true that what will suffice for many people isn't very enjoyable for others. Physics determines this.
 
Production comprises of the entire presentation layer of the composition, mixing is only one element of the presentation layer makeup, but it influences the end result in a very large way.

;-)
 
With infinite baffles early but gentle bass roll off is part of the deal and room gain is assumed and desired to give a "correct" amount of bass presence. ATCs are in this camp, even the ones with ports roll off relatively early and gently compared to many speakers.

Some designs go for a flat response as deep as possible, with a steep roll off after that. Add in active EQ and some monitors have a flat response to a certain frequency, say 40Hz, and a 6th order roll off from there!

I expect accurate speakers to follow one of these bass patterns with otherwise no gross discontinuities in frequency or phase response.

Above the bass, I expect accurate speakers to shoot for a flat anechoic response.

The only sensible approach is to buy reasonably accurate speakers and place them in the room where the bass balance sounds best by ear. We can't generalise because brick walls will give a completely different bass response to plaster board and of course rooms are of different sizes. Therefore the combination of room and type of speaker will determine where the speaker is best placed.

Vital and I have similar sized (not large) rooms and 50s. He gets plenty of bass even away from room boundaries. I don't ... my 50s need to be against the walls for a balanced bass, maybe because I am upstairs and have a long wall that is plaster board. I expect speaker designers to use one of the general bass models above, they can't and shouldn't legislate for anything else. It is up to me to place the speaker where it works in the room. If a light balance occured even with boundary placement, I would consider a larger model of speaker.
 
My experience is that two friends have active Naim systems and I have passive. Simon is passive valves.
Dave's system is tight forceful bass and has that drive and grip that sounds like I imagined active would sound. Oldie's system is more passive sounding to me and doesn't do that active signature as much. My system is perfectly balanced for me, and Simon's is pipe and slippers, which is incredibly good and not at all like that sounds it should be.
Dave thinks active is the only way to go and I think the opposite because I like my music to be comfortable, dynamic, but delicate and musical in all areas.
It is a matter of taste when it all comes down to it, and I can say that in my experience, it is definitely not for everyone. We all have different tastes and probably hear differently too.
Even if I had a load of active crossovers and more amps in a cupboard somewhere, I wouldn't use them. It isn't for me. I'd be more inclined to go for Simon's valves.
 
With an active setup , you could of course use a solid state amp for bass and valves for the rest and still have the ability to shape and "correct" the sound...
 
darrenyeats said:
Above the bass, I expect accurate speakers to shoot for a flat anechoic response.
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If you mean total calculated power response I would agree but if you mean nearfield on axis anechoic then there is a lot more to it than that and such a measurement will sadly tell us little about how a loudspeaker will sound in a typical living room.
 
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