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

I found that my new Logitech active computer speakers ($20) vastly outperform my previous Insignia passive computer speakers (price unknown, as bundled with ancient computer)!    ;) 

I picked a very nice first video to watch as test:

World's Largest Devil's Toothpaste Explosion - YouTube

Although way out of my price range, this is an interesting take on active vs passive:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkeIanGsKYA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ms0WLy7dAlk

"Good enough" (a plateau by any measure): active

Inveterate tweaker looking for the best (’peak audio’): passive

It’s a really simple equation, in the end (with all the data points on the analysis table).

Actually, it's a very tight race between the Dell laptop and the non-powered Insignia speakers and the Lenovo unit with the Logitech actives!   ;)

teo_audio1,702 posts01-13-2021 11:13am"Good enough" (a plateau by any measure): active

Inveterate tweaker looking for the best (’peak audio’): passive

It’s a really simple equation, in the end (with all the data points on the analysis table).

Good Enough: Passive
Capable of performance no passive speaker will ever be able to achieve due to the inability in a passive speaker to have immediate feedback from the driver itself, nor intimate knowledge of said driver and any number of other factors:  Active


Active speakers are quite threatening both to the speaker community and the amplifier community. Similar to good Class-D with amplifiers, very few speaker companies will have the technical wherewithal to extract the maximum performance out of active speakers and we are just getting started. There are things that can be done in an active system that are virtually impossible in a passive system. Not just simple things like perfect phase alignment even with higher order crossovers,   but applying closed loop position feedback to higher and higher frequencies, compensating for thermal and magnetic compression (and other magnetic factors) on all drivers, and even some concepts for reducing the impacts of doppler distortion.  Add in multiple similar drivers and you start to get into controlled dispersion, etc.

If you apply old thinking to new ideas, you end up with obsolete opinions.