Arkless Electronics
Trade: Amp design and repairs.
Active is MUCH better than passive in every way. If you hear a passive version of a speaker sound better than the active version then they made a complete cock up of the active crossover etc.
Pros and cons of active speakers
- Thread starter Neil P
- Start date
Fatmarley
"It appears my intelligence circuits have melted"
It's marketing talk to sell their active speakers.
Time alignment can help to achieve good phase alignment throughout the crossover region, but it isn't necessary for achieving good phase alignment. There are a number of ways to do it with a passive crossover. It's just more difficult than active.
If you're worried about the temperature of the voice coil changing due to high power. Use drivers that have vented voice coils and high power ratings (pro audio drivers).
I use very low DCR series inductors for my bass drivers, that have next to bugger all impact on driver efficiency or Q.
There's no reason why a passive speaker can't have a linear frequency response and good stereo matching. It's just more of a challenge.
As for IMD, I don't know how higher IMD sounds subjectively, but I do remember reading a thread about loudspeaker distortion over at diyaudio and in blind tests it didn't seem to be a problem, but I can't remember the exact details.
If it is marketing it is exceedingly well buried in their website. It is on the same page as, and lower down than, the cleaning instructions for the cabinets.
adamdea
You are not a sound quality evaluation device
For what’s is worth I think that the advantage of active speakers is that they are obviously the right way to do it and the disadvantage is that you need to run power cables to your speakers. Also I imagine that if they go wrong it’s probably a nightmare.
Tony L
Administrator
It is interesting and perhaps significant that if you asked just about anyone anywhere to list the ten greatest speakers ever made I doubt a single active would make their list. This certainly isn’t new technology either, K&H were making the forerunner of what is the current Neumann range way back in the 1960s, and I doubt they were the first. In the home audio market there have been countless offerings from Naim, Linn, Nytech, ARC, Meridian, AVI etc etc, yet here we are. That ‘best of’ list is still going to be full of Western Electric horns, Tannoys, Quad ESLs, Apogees, Maggies, BBC monitors, JBLs, Klipschorns, NS1000s, Infinity IRS etc.
Discuss (5 points).
PS For clarity I’m not knocking active; if everything I owned was wiped-out and I had to buy new with insurance money I’d certainly consider a pair of MEG RL901s.
Discuss (5 points).
PS For clarity I’m not knocking active; if everything I owned was wiped-out and I had to buy new with insurance money I’d certainly consider a pair of MEG RL901s.
darrenyeats
pfm Member
Those are the MEGs I've heard Tony. Sounded good to me!
Not really a fair comparison as active speakers have grown in popularity quite recently as people have moved to a more streaming based solution. If you asked the public at large who make the best speakers they’d probably say Sonos or Bose.
onlyconnect
pfm Member
Active speakers are the better solution technically though when I ran an active system I struggled a bit with switching sources. Went back to passive and don’t worry about it. Though I also have soundbars which are active of course!
Tim
Tim
Arkless Electronics
Trade: Amp design and repairs.
Active has largely been a pro thing and passive speakers must outnumber actives by at least 100:1, hence the average hi fi enthusiasts "best ever" speaker is likely to be given as one of the best and most well known passive designs.
Any and all of the designs Tony names above would be better still if they were active and in fact some of the top BBC monitors from early 70's onward were active and had power amps from usually Quad, HH and later Chord in a "shelf/drawer" under the speaker.
Another huge factor here is that whilst a given speaker will be better active, active can't really make up for poorer drive units and bad design of cabinets etc hence as there are vastly more passive speaker designs extant there is a much better chance that some of these got it right in the basics of acoustic design etc.
Any and all of the designs Tony names above would be better still if they were active and in fact some of the top BBC monitors from early 70's onward were active and had power amps from usually Quad, HH and later Chord in a "shelf/drawer" under the speaker.
Another huge factor here is that whilst a given speaker will be better active, active can't really make up for poorer drive units and bad design of cabinets etc hence as there are vastly more passive speaker designs extant there is a much better chance that some of these got it right in the basics of acoustic design etc.
Tony L
Administrator
I agree with the latter point, but that has always been true, e.g. in the ‘70s it would have been Fidelity, Dynatron or whatever mainstream stuff. Specialist hi-fi has always been its own thing.
I stand by my argument that in the UK active has had a very high profile for the vast majority of my audio-buying life. Again Naim, Linn, Meridian etc. Massive magazine and dealer push, but very little customer take-up. As I understand it the Naim SNAXO was a remarkably primitive thing being nothing more than a 12 or 24db filter (can’t remember which), i.e. no attempt to correct for driver anomalies, cabinet resonances etc. The BBC LS5/8 (Quad 405-based) crossover being far more complex with notch filters, time-alignment etc. A friend has a pair so I know those very well. Lovely speakers IMO.
Regardless I don’t buy the idea active speakers are a modern thing beyond a very current ‘lifestyle’ context where the goal is to make things small and bass-heavy with a minimum of boxes. I’d argue many modern ‘active speakers’ have more in common with a TV sound bar than a proper hi-fi system. I guess they are nothing new to me as I knew people with LS5/8s, active DBLs etc. I first heard active Isobariks and SBLs way back in the 1980s! To be honest I never got it, never aspired to them. In hindsight that is likely down to the SNAXO just not being a very good crossover (I like LS5/8s!). My opinion doesn’t matter, the simple fact is active is nothing new at all. The advances are in cheap class D amps and DSP. The rest is as old as the hills, or as old as me certainly.
There is a difference between active speakers & those being driven actively IMV. The massive multi box naim/linn version of active was only ever going to be a niche within a niche. Loads of faff & cables, massive towers of equipment.
Good quality active speakers with high spec drive units can sound utterly brilliant with relatively modest gear up stream. I know because that’s what I have (comparatively).
I bet the current Linn way sounds a lot better than the old & is far more discreet.
Unless I’m very much mistaken ATC amp packs can be serviced just like any other piece of audio.
The amp pack in my master failed catastrophically
As in bang ! Followed by the rather pungent smell of fried electronics to be fair to Kef they replaced the unit without question or delay.
Luckily I live a stones throw from the factory.
Arkless Electronics
Trade: Amp design and repairs.
The concept is old yes but in sales terms it has taken the cheapening and miniaturisation of the electronics, combined with less heat to be got rid of in many cases, to make them a mass market thing. First "gain clone" type IC amps then class D amps, each usually with SMPS have made the actual electronics "cheap as chips" when really mass produced and small enough to be put inside even tiny speakers and without much problem in keeping enclosed amps etc cool enough. This is what has made them "suddenly" a mass market phenomenon and especially with the "less boxes required" being a big sales thing to many that put domestics such as WAF high on the list!
It's been a bit of a double edge sword though in that active speakers of the cheap 'n nasty variety have become "a thing"!
It's been a bit of a double edge sword though in that active speakers of the cheap 'n nasty variety have become "a thing"!
Tony L
Administrator
None of my comments are aimed at the likes of ATC or MEG, both of whom have an excellent reputation for long-term product support. I suspect Neumann will be good too as they are part of the Sennheiser group, and they’ve always been superb with regards to product support (e.g. you can buy every part of a pair of HD600s as a spare!). I don’t understand why they rebranded Klein & Hummel to Neumann though. A huge shame to lose that name to history even if the Neumann products are K&H in all but logo.
John Phillips
pfm Member
IMHO yes. I have active 'speakers which are available in passive versions too. Contradicting what is often reported as a big difference, my experience of the passive versions was that they shared the recognizable good characteristics of the underlying drivers and cabinets. The similarities were greater than the differences.
Good underlying fundamentals is why I made the first part of my choice. I could have quite happily lived with active or passive. Choosing the active version (as I did) was not based on how different the two sounded to me. It was to do with my opinion that active is the better way to drive a loudspeaker that is fundamentally well enough sorted out technically to start with, and one with a future path that looked good for long-term ownership.
I think Meridian are well respected in this regard also. I would be a little wary of some of the fancier DSP based designs but I don’t have any evidence that they are unreliable.
Arkless Electronics
Trade: Amp design and repairs.
That's a good sign that things have been well engineered in both the passive and active versions I guess.
There are not many designs available as passive or active to be able to make the comparison of course!
It is generally the case though, and my own experience backs it up, that active sounds considerably better. Generally better dynamics, punchier, clearer, more detail, crisper, and usually greater max SPL. A passive design thought very clear, crisp and transparent can sound rather muddy after hearing a good active version...
I think the main point is that complicated, lossy, crossovers are the biggest issue restricting passive speakers and if the drive units and acoustic design are of such quality that a very simple crossover of only one or two elements and no resistors is made with expensive low resistance foil wound inductors and polypropylene caps then the advantage from going active can be much less profound.
OTOH many of the best passive speakers historically have needed complex passive crossovers in order to give a flat response and eq out peaks etc in older type drive units. Many of the attempts to use VERY simple crossovers to get around the above have been rather a curates egg IMHO... Epos ES14, Mission 770 and many others with either no low pass crossover or just a single inductor (like the 770) have "active-ISH" immediacy and some of the better points of active designs but tend to rather sacrifice something in terms of colouration and subtlety compared to the likes of BBC monitor types as there can be lets say a peak in the bass unit output at 5KHz that hasn't been eq'ed out.
Active can give the best of both worlds
Lucky you. My brothers monitor is winging its way back to Germany. He will have to get used of the sound of silence for a couple of weeks.