Active Speakers Better? No, per Michael Borresen

I have a question to "active in the hobby" audiophiles.  Here's the background:

If you use a super low distortion [active] speaker system, it reveals more about everything upstream. I find that when I use an ATC active, what drives it ( preamp, CD player, streamer, turntable, etc) has a much greater impact on the resulting sound than the same exact speaker as a passive.  Image is greatly affected by active vs passive.  I can hear more "character" differences between these upstream devices, even cables become more obvious.  For me, this increases the desire to play around with different things in the rig and see what the differences are.

So my question: How is active taking choice away or reducing the [audiophile] hobby?  There is far more to a system than amplifiers.  To my ear, it increases choice, as these choices are suddenly far more obvious.. Example: the difference between cartridges is FAR greater than the difference between two good to excellent amps. Note I did not say you cannot hear a difference in amps, I said that other transducers in the system are more evident than amplifiers alone in a passive system.

Brad

@lonemountain , I haven't used an ATC active but agree that my Paradigm Active 20 is far more revealing than the Paradigm Studio 20 which is the passive version. 

I found my choice reduced when it came to speaker cables, which saved me money (yay), so I focused on upgrading the power. All of my speakers are internally biamped so that is a power hungry system when you have as many active speakers as I do. MCH music is sublime in my system, so much that I use it 90% of the time. If my speakers were less revealing MCH wouldn't be as satisfying. 

@lonemountain wrote:

If you use a super low distortion [active] speaker system, it reveals more about everything upstream. 

Agreed.

So my question: How is active taking choice away or reducing the [audiophile] hobby? There is far more to a system than amplifiers. To my ear, it increases choice, as these choices are suddenly far more obvious.. Example: the difference between cartridges is FAR greater than the difference between two good to excellent amps. Note I did not say you cannot hear a difference in amps, I said that other transducers in the system are more evident than amplifiers alone in a passive system.

Not to mention that an active approach can be taken with outboard amps and DSP/electronic XO, whereby the choice of these components exists to take the hobby element of active even further, not least with regard to setting filter values if a more radical DIY-path is chosen. Even though amps matter less imprinting-wise here there’s still a worthwhile process to be pursued in differentiating them, both in terms of quality and quantity of wattages, to their dedicated and respective driver segments.