Powered speakers show audiophiles are confused

@kota1 ​​@mijostyn ’s main speakers are floor to ceiling line sources. He does not need to worry much about floor and ceiling for them and side wall reflections are likely to be a bit lower. Still have floor/ceiling and side walls for bass as the subs are omnidirectional at those frequencies.

@donavabdear since no one final masters in a perfectly flat room and mixing highly nearfield is the only thing that comes close why would you want to playback flat?

This brings us back to the original topic. You do want the direct sound perfectly flat if you can. Active speakers do that better than anything. That gives you a great starting point. From there do your room acoustics and subs to get close to your target non flat in room curve. Finally DSP to soften anything really off. Room correction has to make the on axis non flat to correct the room. Modern processors try to understand what is direct /reflect so they don’t over correct but it is not easy.

@ricevs we have had direct digital amps for quite some time. It sounds simple but is not. A DAC does not need feedback. Amplifiers generally do. Direct digital and DAC/AMP each have their advantages and disadvantages. Direct digital amps are single bit so far. DACs are multibit. The math in a multibit implementation allows more tolerance for the engineers to do their stuff. Does it matter? No, both can be transparent. Same with silicon and GaN. Silicon can already be transparent. GaN could make for nicer but meaningless specs. For us we like the reduced packaging/heat sink requirements GaN may offer.

@ricevs , that is an excellent post, I had 0 clue about those solutions, thanks!

This really should be a case by case scenario discussion. Definitely not a black and white topic. Especially with the advent of some very nice active component “systems” now available, and being designed by several different companies - boutique and commercial. 
 

I love the sonic changes produced by different amps in terms of their compatibility with my components upstream. But I’d also really love to try some Buchardt A500 or A700’s, KEF LS 60’s (when I could afford the luxury of additional systems) or anything that might turn up in the near future with interesting offerings and superb design. 
 

Genelec’s are interesting to me, as they tend to cross that threshold into the tonal aspect of home audio of listening. Not just a cold/analytical studio monitor. But I digress. 

@ricevs  Class-D is not PWM. PWM is not "Class D type amplification". The only thing they share in common is switching devices. Purifi is a Class-D amplification product that uses the input signal and feedback to reference the output to a clean analog input. There is no equivalent in a digital PWM implementation.

I believe the first one made was the Tact Millennium back in the late 90s. The PCM digital signal is changed in software to PWM (class D type amplification). Tocatta Technologies (TACT) was headed by inspired people who now work for Purifi. It seems odd that Purifi does not have a digital amp board.....prehaps soon...they will.

Simply hooking amplifiers up to drivers and using a digital crossover only provides some, but not all the benefits of active speakers.

You give a lot of bad if not misleading advice in your article. As a business, there is a level of negligence in doing that. That the new MOFI speaker. Encouraging people to take it apart, simply replace the cross over, and then lower the tweeter is terrible advice. Very few people have the experience or tools to do this. You can make some final tunings to a speaker by ear, but 99% of the work is with tools. Getting the crossover frequency right both for evenness of frequency and disperson, the slopes, any necessary notch filters, etc. is not something you just "do" by throwing in a digital crossover. At a minimum you need a calibrated measurement microphone and knowledge of how to measure a speaker / speaker driver. Then you need to understand what those measurements mean and how to turn that into a solution. You may get lucky or more likely convince yourself it sounds good by ear, with the first music you listen to, but across a wide range of music there will be issues.  I am sure Andrew put a lot of thought into the crossover frequency based on distortion of the tweeter, output at frequency, and dispersion, or more specifically matching dispersion to the woofer and using the woofer as a wave guide. Again, it is negligent to blindly tell people to drop the crossover frequency on a tweeter without knowing the impact, which is likely to be negative.

@thespeakerdude A question about your audio philosophy. Speakers should be like microphones they should record and playback flat if there is an audio character to the microphone sometimes that's great and it helps the happiness of the final product just like speakers. There isn's an exact right or wrong I remember in a recording studio I worked at we had an old EV microphone cable that added just the right amount of warmness (lack of high end) to the vocals of some people. To me microphones and speakers should record and playback in the most accurate way possible. Using room correction that changes the speakers is in general wrong, we should change the room, clearly that's the right way to do things but it is difficult, expensive and takes a lot of skill and luck. Fixing surround sound speakers with room correction makes sense because of the timing issues but also in that case the correct solution is again putting the speakers at the right distances physically. Flat rooms are awful and never work because phasing and wobbling sound is part of why we understand what sound is. Speakers should be flat if they're not the room may not work with the speakers in the same way if room correction software flattens the room with the speakers we have the same problem. Reason no #335 why audiophiles are on a slippery slope concerning proper sound reproduction. There seems to be several groups like the AES that want to standardize surround sound playback systems which is a great idea, after that standard is realized we can color our system the way we want but if there is no foundation our feet are firmly planted in mid air. Do you agree?