Powered speakers show audiophiles are confused

jerryg123 your post reminds me of a continual conversation with a friend who worked at a vintage guitar store. This guy knows practically every guitar setup for every band you can imagine, he sells rare guitars to very rich musicians all the time. I would always argue with him saying how do you justify selling a 100k guitar to someone then run it through some raunchy guitar amp and still live with yourself. He would say it’s rock n roll man. I knew what he meant but that answer doesn’t square with buying a 100k vintage guitar for its amazing sound. That’s where super cool 2 channel systems in our world are the same they are not accurate but they sound super cool.

@donavabdear

We need to understand psychoacoustics and the huge placebo effect that we experience in the audiophile community.

This represents YOUR perception which is fine, do you have anything published about this "placebo" effect? As for psychoacoustics do you have any creds?

Technobabble begets techno babble, claims can be linked to research. What links can you share to back this up?

with a friend who worked at a vintage guitar store. 

I hope this isn't your "research", then again I wouldn't be surprised if you were taken in by the "halo" effect...LOL.

@donavabdear I also have vintage  guitar amps  Vox Essex, Marshall Plexi, and a Fender Twin Reverb, I am still a hack.

Love the tube sound and that will always keep me away from powered speakers for my home system's . 

Cheers. 

kota1
I suspect you know a lot about psychoacoustics and audio placebo effects. I started in acoustics, went to live sound then movie sound in my career all the while studying physics. I can't imaging people spending hundreds of thousands on sound equipment that don't know anything about the psychological effects of sound. Just google it. 

I've seen how musicians listen back to their vocals and obsess about things that aren't there I've apologized to directors about how bad the sound was and they had no Idea what I was talking about one director told me the sound was great he told me he just told a producer  "this is a fabulous recording it's going on the album for the movie". I also set up sound for Milli Vanilli, I didn't know it was all fake the sound system was real. One of the singers twisted his ankle and ran off stage where I was there was panic everywhere and the singer (I don't remember which one) wen't back on stage and just didn't jump around as much. No one could tell they were faking it, but when you see their performances today it is obvious they were. 
 

@ronboco wrote:

Why does an onboard amp in an active speaker pair better than separate amplification ?

In an active config. an onboard amp by itself doesn’t pair better than an outboard ditto. Remember, active can be an outboard solution as well.

Are the drivers different than a passive speaker?

Not necessarily.

Are the crossovers different than in a passive speaker?

Yes, active XO’s are placed prior to amplification on signal level, not on the amp’s output side between that and the drivers taking the full power.

It seems the only thing active does is eliminate the need for an external amp.

No, primarily active eliminates the passive XO between the amp and drivers, and this gives the amp(s) much better control over the drivers sans intervening passive XO components, which in turn has the drivers perform more accurately to what’s fed to them by the dedicated amp sections.

@ghasley wrote:

An example would be the speaker designer could match the appropriate amp to the appropriate speaker driver to achieve their design goals optimally.

While amp matching certainly isn’t irrelevant, its importance - in some respects - has been blown a bit out of proportion, if you ask me. Overall, active config. also allows the designer to downscale amps, while getting away with it, being the output power is more effectively used sans passive XO’s, and they also perform (i.e.: sound) better actively. As a bundled solution that comes in handy with more compact designs.

Not trying to diminish amp matching, as per your next quoted paragraph below, but often it means allowing the designer to potentially downscale while dedicating amp sections to their specific driver dittos.

An extreme mismatch example would be for an active two way where the amp driving the top end was a class d plate amp and the low frequency driver driven by a class A 10 watt amp.

Indeed. It’s what I do myself in my outboard config. active setup; lower wattage class A from the lower to central mids on up, high power class TD taking over down to the upper bass, and high power class A/B from here to 20Hz. Common wisdom, very generally, may dictate class D variants to the lowest octaves, but I’ve found using my class A/B amp (MC² Audio) to serve better from 20 to ~85Hz and having a bigger, more positive effect on the remaining frequency spectrum above in comparison to using my class TD Lab.Gruppen amp here, which is no slouch either, I might add. Interestingly the MC² Audio amp is the better full-performer vs. the Lab.Gruppen (but not the Belles class A, which is the best of the bunch), to my ears, and yet the overall sonic picture has it serving better in the subs region - go figure. 

That’s what an outboard solution allows you, to use external quality amps and experiment with their implementation in the respective frequency spectrums.