I Was Considering Active, Then I Watched This ...

No one talks about ABx for speakers because the sonic character is generally enough to easily match x to A or B. Of course AB speaker comparison is very difficult due to movement and positioning issues and accurate volume matching in room without suitable tools or experience. It's almost silly bringing up.

Also silly is to use Legacy as an example, not the most accurate speakers at the best of time and no guarantee that the passive or the active versions are optimum and doubtful Legacy had the knowledge or experience to optimize an active crossover or if DSP, the ADC to be transparent.

The best would be to compare equal priced speakers considered state of the art in both genres and then compare the sound to very neutral headphones as the goal is not to determine what you "like" but what is most accurate. We are not judging flavor here but accuracy.

Thanks douglas_schroeder
HiFi Critic, a respected UK mag, did a comparison between the standard passive ATC 50 and the standard active 50 version.

http://atcloudspeakers.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/ATC_SCM50ASL_Review_Hi-Fi_Critic_Sept_19.pdf

M Colloms slightly preferred the timing of the passive version driven by a £20k naim power amp. However the discrete anniversary amp pack is a significant improvement over the standard one used in the review.

I don’t understand why you need a speaker manufacturer to build an active speaker, when you can make a lot of speakers active with an active crossover and your choice of amps.

Um, kind of sort of, but not fully. There are a couple of things you are missing:

1 - Crossovers are more than Hz and slope. They also have EQ features and level matching.
2 - You have to remove the internal crossover to achieve all the benefits of an active speaker system, especially higher efficiency.

Consider for instance that most tweeters are padded down because they tend to have a higher sensitivity than their mid/woofer counter parts. That is, there are resistors in there which are converting power to heat. If you remove them, then there’s no such waste.

Next, your external crossover is additive, not in place of the existing crossover and slope, so things get complicated. Now instead of 1 high-pass filter, and 1 low pass filter you have 2 of each.

So, if you do remove the internal crossover, you will also have to make up for any EQ that was built in.

I mean, it’s not a completely useless idea to use an external crossover on a speaker designed to be bi-wired or bi-amped, but it’s also not the same as a fully active system.

Should also point out that we are doing a lot of this when we add an active subwoofer with crossover, but in this case most speakers dont' have a high pass filter (YG being one very weird exception) at the crossover slope.