Active speakers properly engineered, designed and built with top parts should sound great at home or the studio. The is nothing about a studio that is different other than lower noise floor and perhaps more absorption. The problem is a"better" speaker does not always make every recording sound better. Reducing distortion reveals more and more about a recording- details or flaws that you've never heard before. Distortion in playback, regardless of source, has a masking effect that covers up details. It's the effect of getting glasses after a lifetime of blurred vision: you now really see enormous detail, but what you see is often not so pretty. You might then ask why would we ever want that, to hear how awful our recordings are. Well the benefit of hearing clearly is that you can finally hear the details the artist, engineer, mastering worked very hard to capture and reveal. You cannot appreciate a Renoir if your vision is blurry. If I play a high rez version of Michael Jackson Thriller, chances are you will hear a LOT of information you never heard before that will make you smile like never before. Or play a George Massenburg recording and the same thing will happen (here's a list:
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/george-massenburg-mn0000945891/credits
Play something poorly recorded and you may not be able to turn it off fast enough. Yuck! An old rock and roll recording is likely quite bad, like Led Zeppelin. Awesome music, horrible recordings (that did capture a cool moment in time anyway). You sort of have to learn to separate great music from great sound because they are not related. It's still fun to hear Elvis Presley with a band panned to one side and him to the other each with their own (very limited bandwidth) ribbon mic from 1958. But you aren't listening to be amazed by the audio quality. There's nothing you can do to fix this other than buy speakers with massive EQ built in to them and are high enough distortion you don't hear any flaws in the recording. You would not buy expensive speakers if that's the only music you listen to. But if you heard Sarah Jarosz on a fantastic pair of speakers- even if you dislike Americana-the recording is just so darn amazing its magical-a thrill in itself just to hear something that good. You'll never hear that magic on a low rez, high distortion system.
That's why active is important. Its the only way to get a lot of distortion out of the speaker.
Brad
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/george-massenburg-mn0000945891/credits
Play something poorly recorded and you may not be able to turn it off fast enough. Yuck! An old rock and roll recording is likely quite bad, like Led Zeppelin. Awesome music, horrible recordings (that did capture a cool moment in time anyway). You sort of have to learn to separate great music from great sound because they are not related. It's still fun to hear Elvis Presley with a band panned to one side and him to the other each with their own (very limited bandwidth) ribbon mic from 1958. But you aren't listening to be amazed by the audio quality. There's nothing you can do to fix this other than buy speakers with massive EQ built in to them and are high enough distortion you don't hear any flaws in the recording. You would not buy expensive speakers if that's the only music you listen to. But if you heard Sarah Jarosz on a fantastic pair of speakers- even if you dislike Americana-the recording is just so darn amazing its magical-a thrill in itself just to hear something that good. You'll never hear that magic on a low rez, high distortion system.
That's why active is important. Its the only way to get a lot of distortion out of the speaker.
Brad