Pros and Cons of built-in amps?

Usarrn,

The thing is those vibration sources can be and typically are taken care of. That's why we spend money on good racks and isolation platforms.

You certainly are not going to "detect" obvious things like doppler distortion or obvious effects of vibration, but they are going to be there, as anybody who's ever experimented with vibration control will tell you. It tends to affect about everything.

Inside the speaker itself is going to be the worst source of vibration. Even moving the crossover outside of the speaker pays dividends, which is why some manufacturers do it, and now we're just talking about a few caps and coils.

There's nothing at all wrong with active speakers, but the point is they come with trade-offs, like most things in audio. They're not, IMO, a stroke of genius and not the wave of the future. All of this also assumes that you buy into the mantra that digital amps are "just fine" and amplifiers don't really having any bearing on sound quality.

If you happen to be into open baffles, it's not so easy to make them active anyway. :) Well, there's duck tape...

the obvious disadvatage is removing freedom of choice. i don't a manufacturer dictating what amp i should use.
it is a foolish marketing strategy.

Audiophiles just will not give an active speaker system a chance. Could it be that it is not about the music, as they are fond of saying, but the new equipment of the month that they are so passionate about?

I think there are certainly audiophiles that are guilty of exactly what you describe, but there are also plenty of us that are purely after the best sonic results possible- no matter how they are achieved.

The simple fact is that the best speakers and amplifiers to date have not been active. This has come up several times in various threads and the answer is still the same. On paper, active systems seem to have many advantages, but in practice and in the real world, they have failed to live up to those claims.

Don't get me wrong, they can be quite good as has been demonstrated by some of the Meridian active speaker systems, but few would argue that the Meridian cannot be beat by many combinations of separate amps and passive loudspeakers.

Much of this is common sense. The designers that have the most talent and expertise in loudspeaker design are not as good at designing electronics and visa versa. Perhaps more importantly, if you believe that the best amplifiers on earth are all vacuum tube designs (as I and many others do) then active speakers with their built-in solid state amps are at a huge disadvantage from the start.

In practice, active crossovers have also not been able to achieve the transparency of the highest quality passive crossovers using today's best film capacitors and air core inductors. Those who don't accept the superiority of vacuum tubes are probably not going to "get" this one either, but it happens to be true.

Active speakers, especially with good DSP, are going to bring very good (not the best) sound to many people at more affordable prices in the coming years. These speakers will be easier to set up and less finicky about room issues for people who aren't obsessed audiophiles looking to extract every last molecule of sound quality. Professional studios already reap these benefits and in exchange give up the ultimate sound quality for something that is good enough and revealing enough to get the job done.

Whether active speakers can ever rise to challenge the state of the art remains to be seen. Perhaps someday.