Opinions and recommendations on active loudspeakers

The very first time I heard active speakers were the John Bowers Active 1's waayyy back in 1986.  They were shockingly dynamic!  There really is something special about getting all those Inductors & Capacitors out from between the amps & drivers.  Audiophiles think that "control" is being taken away from them because they cannot choose their own flavor of amplification... but that control is being transferred to the speaker designer...   It took me a LONG time to finally buy a pair of actives...... and am now a very happy owner of ADAM S3H's.  Yes they are digital, and they are very revealing, dynamic, and fun to listen to.  Yes they are a pro monitor, and I have a studio and do mixing.... But these are truly amazing speakers and worthy of any audiophile to consider.  Focal also makes really good powered monitors (and not digital).  They are prettier than the ADAMs, but in a a side by side comparison, I chose the ADAM.

I prefer partially self-powered speakers, for built in bass power only.  I'm looking at Von Schweikert Aktive series and have heard their Ultra series.  Great speakers.  Legacy audio offers similar type speakers with DSP as well.  Full active speakers are restrictive in the end unless it is just the match one desires.  I've heard a few dozen and some are very good, but not the equal of my passive speakers or the Von Schweikerts.

No one mentioned it here, but there is a fundamental differrence between
a) near field listening (e.g. at a mixing desk or desktop) and
b) listening in a living room.

Studio monitors are usually very resolving and dynamic sounding in near field setups where they can be very convincing and satisfying, but they can generally also be very disappointing (muddiness, harschness, coloration, uneavenness, boominess) if you try to use them in your living room, unless you pad your room walls like a studio (diffusors, absorbers, bass traps, ...), which is a route I personnally do not want to go.

I know very few speakers that do the trick in an untreated living room, if this is the goal. My recommendation would be to look at speakers based on
1) dipole principle, also for the bass (reducing room interaction and masking by acoustic energy that gets stored/released in cavities/pannels),
2) as constant directivity as possible (reducing coloration of reflected sounds) and
3) active drive in a separate box (reducing the difficult to predict effect on frequency response and distorsion of speaker cables and crossover components, the high level amplifier outputs having to deal only with the easy load of a single driver).

I believe LXmini or LX521 would be my best recommendations, while giving you a lot of room for tweaking and upgrades (DIY or turn key systems available, DSP or AnalogSP, you can use your own amps or Hypex NCores). Cost is also very reasonnable. Sound is out of this world.

for me, i move around alot and need to keep the number of physical units to as few as possible. i surmise that any active monitor manufacturer has the opportunity at the spec-design stage and also the actual listening stage to put an amp behind the drivers that they feel performs well. .. and i do not have to deal with the connections, an added plus. i have low-fi, JBL LSR 305's and my main set AirPulse Model 1 (A200 for the rest of the world).. i listen to these all day, every day.

Some interesting posts here.....the first two active speaker companies the I know of were Genelec (which I represented years and years ago) and ATC (which we now import to the US as lone mountain).  Both companies have a long history of "how its done" and both started primarily in studio market, where passives were very much in control of the market in the late 70s and early 80s.  ATC was an owner operator so they stuck close to home, they got support early on from Pink Floyd and others in the UK.  Genelec raised money and went international very early and had a significant break out hit, the 1031.  For small active 2 way, this thing rocked.  So much better than the passives of the day.  The 1031 was used for more movies in the 80s than any other I think!  Genelec made a great sounding ribbon tweeter speaker early on too, the S30, lovely speaker but it sort of faded way for unknown reasons.  .

I think the number one reason active is considered better than passives by many (speaker) designers is the ability to control phase.  Building a speaker that's linear in phase response is a wondrous thing to behold.  The other side benefits of active are easier to guess: super short cables, the right power to each driver, easy to calibrate a system for flat response with amp/driver level, easier to do a electronic crossover than a passive one and you use higher slopes with active so you can get some additional performance out of that.  

A lot of folks don't know that passive crossovers have a tough time with changing driver values as they heat up, changing crossover behavior.  That's why in pro, you cannot have a speaker "sound different in the morning" than the night before.   

Brad
Lone Mountain Audio