Which Would You Prefer

This hobby is all about mixing and matching equipment to listen for the differences and although we say once we get it right we’re done, we really never get done. 
I spent a few years listening to $20k+/- speakers with some solid components and after awhile I realized that to truly get the system to sing as one would expect I would have to seriously upgrade my components and cables, I chickened out and went with the Meridian dsp 8000 and se upgrade. 
It got to the point that demoing speakers was pointless because they sounded completely different once home, at least with dsp speakers they generally have room correction programmed in them so room interaction is minimal and we don’t have to worry about our components playing nice. 

Active will ALWAYS sound better with proper design chops.

separates

Received opinion seems to be that actives with digital sound processing and cardioid sound radiation are the wave of the future--e.g., Kii Three and Dutch & Dutch 8c loudspeakers.

Apparently active speakers never took off (until recently) because audiophiles like to tinker about, mixing and matching components. (If that's your thing, go for it!)

Speaker engineers, unlike audiophiles, are in no position to discount the advantages of active speakers. Andrew Jones tells us that in actives:

Each amplifier is matched to the driver, and only has to operate over a limited frequency range. It’s operating into a simpler impedance, so it’s not going to have high-current demands. Also, the temporal characteristics of music change with frequency. High frequencies require very little average power, but have a lot of peaks. Bass requires much higher average power, but has far fewer peaks. You can match the amplifier to those characteristics as well.

As a gesture to the audiophile penchant for tinkering, Jones’s ARB-5s forgo digital signal processing. He nevertheless acknowledges its advantages:

DSP is very versatile as a development tool. If I want to make a change to an analog crossover, I have to solder in new components. With DSP, I can push a few buttons, load in a new crossover profile, and a minute later, I can listen to it. In production, there are no tolerance issues with DSP the way there are with the parts in an analog crossover. With DSP, the crossover shape will be identical on every unit. I can provide a lot more equalization with a DSP, with very little degradation. With analog, every time I want to add another filter section, the signal has to go through another op-amp stage. (https://www.soundstagesimplifi.com/index.php/feature-articles/80-active-voices-part-one-elacs-andrew-jones)

Moreover, in all active speakers the specific frequencies for each specific driver “crossover” before amplification, yet another enhancement of audio design.

Other engineers echo these same points. Listen to Paul McGowan from PS Audio at 03:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inZQKHqayow , or Dynaudio’s Roland Hoffman at 03:20 and 13:06 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2XTQO0f7n4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2XTQO0f7n4), or Meridian’s Bob Stuart (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VDQwQ0n3pU). They all work for companies that sell passive speakers or equipment for them, but they all clearly favor the design opportunities found in actives.

Active speakers do have their drawbacks, of course, but from an engineering and sound reproduction standpoint, actives seem to be the way to go. (The vast majority of studio monitors are active.)

Somthing for everyone in this hobby. I've got tubes in the listning room switchers in the studio with "embedded" subwoofers in both.