I think many of theses posts attribute qualities to "active" that are not due to the active vs passive nature of the system. Truth is a proper active system is MORE holographic and MORE detailed than an ordinary passive system, in the same room using the same drivers and sources. You can easily hear a difference using different pucks, speaker cables, power cables and all the same exotic gear you use with passive system. I have demoed this many times at shows or private demos. It all makes a difference and its only more obvious in active.
There’s also this undercurrent "what if my amp [in my speaker] fails? AH, remove the amp and send it in for repair just like your stand alone amp? There is no throwing a speaker away unless it’s a cheap piece of crap that cannot be repaired. Active doesn’t mean unrepairable. I have many active speaker that have been powered ON for 20 years and have not failed- in studios- used and abused 18 hours a day. So this reliability thing is a not real.
The primary sonic advantage of active is 1) improving imaging and 2) resolution of the finest details such as reverb tails, room sound where the recording was made, instrument harmonics and details, all the subtle information that brings [desired] additional information to the playback experience. Most artists think more awareness of what it really sounds like is a positive. Most great recording engineers obsess over this just as audiophiles do. The specific harmonic structure of a guitar or piano or violin is very complex and any distortion that covers up details is noted and often removed. Sometimes, a specific flavor is imparted in certain recordings by choosing specific microphones or mic preamps, just like audiophiles choose different speakers and amps for flavor. But the overwhelming target of the recording process is more resolution, so the myriad of differences become more obvious in the final result. Skilled listeners such as recording engineers like George Massenburg cannot stop hearing these details and have en endless pursuit of greater and great resolution: ie. better sound.
If the recording sounds bad, active will not fix that. If your front end has flaws, active will not fix that either. If your room sounds off or weird, it will still sound weird with active. All the same rules apply to your system and sources where everything makes a difference. There is no magic in active. Cheap active will not be as good as excellent passive just as cheap Class D sucks but very good (and expensive) Class D is pretty darn good. Excellent active will be better than excellent passive, every time, as long as it properly executed.
All this discussion of active "taking away options" is marketing by amp companies or those who don’t have a role in an all active loudspeaker universe. It’s critical to understand what active really is: "powered" is not active; "powered" is a passive crossover speaker with a full range amp inside the speaker box. This will sound the same as passive system except using shorter speaker cables.
In understanding active, it’s hard to argue that adding parts between amp and speaker (inductors, capacitors, filters and cable) could possibly improve definition. This is counter to everything else we know in audio, where less is almost always more. Insisting on passive "is the only way" is like insisting 30 feet of speaker cable is always better than 6. [30 feet of Cardas could be better than 6 feet of lamp cord, but 30 feet of Cardas cable will never sound better than 6 feet of the same Cardas cable] This is the point of active, it’s removing filters and things that color the sound before it ever hits the speaker, ie. a bunch of parts, circuit boards, caps and resistors and the speaker cable itself. Active is moving the amp closer to the driver, removing everything we can between the two. active is removing the lack of control of the driver, such as phase linearity relative to the other drivers in the system, which in active form restores control over elements of the speaker we previously could not. This "shorter path" and "straight wire" approach works not from an engineering perspective, but a sonic perspective as well.
Brad