Powered speakers show audiophiles are confused

@lonemountain 

It's tens of feet -maybe even a hundred feet of wire in a giant LF inductor set up for a very low crossover point.

No maybe. If someone makes a design choice to use an air core inductor on a woofer circuit in a 3 way, it does not even need to be that low of frequency for there to be a couple hundred feet. Go for a low frequency and you can be above 500 feet of wire. Then they may compound that by using Litz increasing the resistance without benefit.

Audiophiles clearly care about speaker wire a lot, there's a huge industry built around it.  Somehow all the wire inside a passive speaker's crossover is just forgotten about.  When the differences in wire are so widely accepted, I can't imagine how a person who invested in great speaker wire would think the much longer length of wire in the speakers crossover inductors is in any way sonically invisible.  

Brad

@invalid,

I have to view purity from a throughput from the input to the amplifier to what comes out of the drivers. I don't think a case can be made, with any set of drivers, where the purity from input to output cannot be superior with an active configuration. That does not mean you are going to prefer an active speaker, or even that you will prefer an active version of a speaker over an equivalent passive as the frequency response may be different which may not be to your taste, or may not work as well in your listening space. If the speaker design does not have good matching of the dispersion between drivers at the crossover points, than crossover differences between an active and passive version of the same design could have a pronounced in room difference. Flat baffles for tweeters and even some mid-range drivers should go the way of the Dodo (IMHO).

@thespeakerdude 

Wise comments about purity.  It is absolutely true that not everyone prefers the active version of a well executed design.  I sometimes wonder if posting in favor of active makes people think there is no alternative.  I've done this demo, this comparison, I've demo'd active vs passive (ATC SCM40) of the same speaker using the same amplifiers right next to each other in the same room.  Despite the audibly clear advantage of the active to me, some still picked passive (without knowing which was which).  I have noticed how seating position can impact this choice, so a great observation that crossover differences can lead to room differences that may be part of the listener's choice.

There is no such thing as a pure chain, there are tradeoffs. I never said passive was better than active, what I said was I didn't like the sound of the powered speakers that I have heard. I do like active systems that I can pick the amplifiers and not be stuck with what comes with the speaker.