Powered speakers show audiophiles are confused

@secretguy Please tell me more about why the OP is confused about powered speakers, I could give you 2 dozen incontrovertible design advantage for designing the driver for each amp synergistically without a crossover in between. Look at it this way audiophiles like myself have spent millions on sound equipment over the years why would anyone buy an expensive speaker and connect an amp to it that wasn’t designed for that speaker let alone driver in the speaker? Think of impedance mismatch, think of the fact that crossovers have to be designed with speaker level signals adding load, who knows how much, between the amp and the driver. Simple basic things like this show that audiophiles are sill buying such expensive systems with basic design flaws, at best they are playing darts. The note about vibration system was simply about how everyone should know active speakers are a superior design but there will always be vibration in the speaker cabinet although active speakers can have amps apart from the cabinet but then you have speaker cables and can’t use the perfect dampening effect of the amp connected to the driver giving better transient response and reliability. 

@mijostyn ,

All "Active" speakers I am familiar with use crappy dynamic drivers and garbage class D amps

What about the ones you aren’t familiar with?

Dynaudio

Elac

Focal

Kef

JBL

Paradigm

Yamaha

Definitive Technology

McIntosh

PMC

Neumann

and on and on we go. I am afraid you are proving, beyond any doubt, the confusion about active speakers among even dedicated audiophiles like yourself. I would tell you to go audition some Sh-t and hit reset, but that would not be polite.

@mijostyn I understand why you would be surprised about reliability. I'm not talking about cheep speakers with amps in them, not at all. I'm talking about what practically all professionals are using in concerts and more and more in studios. When the amp is designed with the driver in mind the end result is a perfect match in impedance and power handling the drivers will last much longer. Also when the amp is directly connected to the driver the driver is dampened perfectly the voice coil will extend and rebound according to the amp, this is only a few reasons why powered speakers are more reliable, do you think live concert companies would use these speakers if they were unreliable. Nope. Also there is the added value of not worrying about speaker cables and saving the cost of the crossover designed with speaker level components not line lever as they should be designed.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas.