Powered speakers show audiophiles are confused


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
  • 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.

Each driver having its own signal processor is the key element. The act of isolating the drivers could be done with biamping, so the IM statement is more marketing than engineering and over-driving is of course something most users can control.

 

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.

A believe they have a corrected impulse response, so the latency is different for each channel, but only in the sense to line up the acoustic centers of the drivers electronically. There will be some latency in the DSP through the system, but will be kept to a minimum. It is a limitation in DSP in speakers, as the expectation is low latency. If you have overall room correction, it is going to correct latency at the speaker level (and maybe more).

 

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.

 

Use a low frequency band limited square wave and sweep the amplitude. That will tell you all you need to know at least from the electronics. It will at the speakers too, but harder to interpret.

 

only using the term crossover in a generic way

I would say functional way. We are providing the crossover function.

@thespeakerdude @kota1 Well darn the guy with the stereo store didn't want to buy my building, he took a month to tell me, oh well, no free upgrades. Thank you both for your wise guidance, I truly appreciate all your insights.

Sure, NP. Post some graphs on your system page when you get the new genelec crossover.

@thespeakerdude 

Post some graphs on your system page if you ever get a system.🤥

@donavabdear , I better hear about you sending those JL subs in for service or I am going to drop a bollock! :-) .... which I honestly have no idea what that means in totality, but I always liked the sound of it and it doesn't get censored so it can't be that bad.