Go Active Crossover or Upgrade existing XOs?

Please remember 85% of Xovers in speakers unless very $$
are substandard.i have been modding Xovers and internal electronics for over 25 years. The Xover parts usually at best have solen capacitors or the China specials Keven speakers at $10 k +
shocking but true I had a 15k Martin logan ,and Sonus Faber 
both had the lower quality white mundorf evo caps.
in your Tannoy he Jupiter copper foil would be excellent 
and use the worlds best resistors from path audio.for my audio get together I demonstrated a experiment a stock monitor audio studio speaker, and one I added $1000 in Xover parts upgrade
it went from a $1500 to a $5k speaker in sound quality vs several 
well known speakers . The Xover is the brain,or heart of all speakers, also buy good WBT Copper connectors not the junk 
gold over brass which comes with most speakers .brass is horrible in natural fidelity vs Copper and has 4 x the resistance = distortion 
i spent literally 1,000s of hours listening and comparing .i usually also replace the cheap internal wire as well as jantzen a Copper inductors . When using a electronics active Xover you can tune it but it looses the flavor of the great capacitors which adds that depth and live presence Lon paper a active is more ruler accurate 
thst applies to solid state vs vacuum tubes in accuracy but 
having a vacuum tube in the circuit adds another dimension in realism. Your ear is the final word in tonal accuracy thst is whst I rely on more then just measuring equipment ,which is just a guide or starting point. After 40 years in Audio and having owned a Audio store .i have had pretty much most things out there learned from many excellent techs on modding .that is why modding 
gives back so much more per $$ dollar spent in fidelity vs just buying new ,for rule of thumb  25% or less  of the product cost actually goes into the parts ,the rest overhead,R&D,and overhead!!

I've been running an active crossover system for nearly thirty years using four ARC amps. Two mono blocks for woofers and then two stereo amps for the mids and highs.  Probably the greatest advantage IMHO is that none of the amps "know" or could care what any other amp is doing. Tons of headroom. If you like to twiddle the knobs its Christmas everyday!  Plus really fun to only run the bass amps to tune the room etc etc. 
The new PS Audio AN3 is a bi-amped system and sounds amazing to me. Arnie Nudell's large systems were bi-amped as well.  Does anyone remember the M&K sub-woofer satellite system way back in the day? BTW, the ARC room at RMAF was a true bi-amped system using three
ARC amps, two mono blocks and a stereo amp powering Sonus Fabers.
All analog system, no digital in the room.  To the OP I say "jump in the water is fine". 
 

I think mijostyn1 and barts28 made salient points.  Audio Research sold both active and passive crossovers early on when they had a co-marketing agreement with Magnepan.  (Some may be interested in learning that Diller was with Johnson at AR way before he went over to Winey's company.)

The passives were available in a few varieties and the actives, which sell for TONS of money today, were also either 2 or 3 and came in several varieties.  Back then, Magnepan wanted you to tri-amp the speakers and Audio Research wanted to sell you many amps, so we sold and set up these systems for customers.

As I remember, and it was 40+ years ago, so take this with a grain, the actives were easier to set to the room than the passives, but both worked rather well when set up properly--most good equipment does.

As to which is better, I would (if I were doing this today) probably go active and put as many amps as possible (barts28) in the system.  If you have Maggies, they eat power, so more is always merrier if you like to crank up Mahler or Zeppelin or whatever.

Cheers,

Richard

@audioman58 from your post would you recommend the Jantzen audio inductors or if not which? I was under the impression their foil inductors were very good but again you've been an expert in this area I rather have your opinion

This is a bit of an ad-populum argument, but not completely without merit. The boutique companies that build "statement" speaker products are likely often lacking the technical depth/resources to build an effective and superior active cross-over. As well, they still need to sell what the market wants, and that market wants their expensive and highly visible amplifiers hooked up to their expensive and highly visible speakers. The market also wants "analog" inputs, and the best active cross-over will be full digital.

millercarbon2,169 posts12-09-2019 11:51amThat’s the technical version. While technically correct, there must be something else going on, or all the world’s best cost no object million dollar systems would be doing this, and all the statement speakers would be designed for it. Which, wait, what’s this? None are? NONE?!?!?!

"Statement" studio monitors do have active cross-overs, and their users are quite critical.

But, the reason not to (or to) use a passive cross-over is for technical reasons, just the right ones. With purely an active cross-over, you have a direct connection to just the driver, and typically with high damping factor. There is an assumption made by some (many?) that this is ideal. That is not a good assumption always ... for technical reasons. Purely analog active cross-overs are typically limited in complexity (like their speaker correlates). Digital cross-overs are unlimited, though stock cross-overs and firmware only touch on what is possible with advanced signal processing which can do things that no analog cross-over, active or passive could ever do, especially integrated in design with a purpose built amplifier.

So ... you can play and tweak a digital cross-over, but without having adequate equipment to verify your results, you are likely going to just fix one problem and create another, till you fix that problem and then create another. Listening is final tweaks. You need measurements to get close, and for speakers, they really do matter. I would just rebuild the passive cross-over unless you are prepared to invest serious time (and money).