Powered speakers show audiophiles are confused


17 of 23 speakers in my studio and home theater systems are internally powered. My studio system is all Genelec and sounds very accurate. I know the best new concert and studio speakers are internally powered there are great technical reasons to design a speaker and an amp synergistically, this concept is much more important to sound quality than the vibration systems we often buy. How can an audiophile justify a vibration system of any sort with this in mind.

128x128donavabdear

Anyone reading this thread who does NOT have an immersive system yet needs to watch the above video. This is NOT hyperbole. Those guys at Capitol Records went back to the ORIGINAL master tapes from their vault, listened to them and raised the bar. If you listen to the description of the engineer at :30 he says that an atmos mix makes the entire room a soundfield. I would say that the entire room becomes a speaker, its like the entire walls, the ceiling, EVERYTHING gets pressurized. When you throw ACTIVE speakers, into a well treated room, calibrated with a good DSP it is WOW.

@donavabdear , you don’t need six figure speakers to achieve this when doing immersive audio. I would take a room like this all day compared to a room with two sound cannons pointed at your head, but that’s just me.

PMC + Dolby Atmos at Home

Seven Bryston Active mini-T’s set up equidistant in the room with 4 matching active mini’ts on tall stands as front and rear heights. forget about it. I would NOT want the Model-T active towers and a lot of smaller speakers. In my setup I have 4 perfectly matched active 40’s as L-R-LS and RS, the matching center, and 6 matching active 20’s as wides (the 40’s wouldn’t fit) and FH, RH. You get that perfect of a match, throw in a tightly calibrated room and KABOOM, it is a, how you call it, amusement park.

DON’T get a jumble, match your bed channels with the exact same speakers if you can, same with height channels. You can make a great system with passive speakers but for me, active makes a better matched system like this.

Remember, the Bryston's use an outboard crossover so you can roll amps to your hearts content. Hook up your BHK toobs to the tweeters and those Bryston monoblocks to the woofers, whatever.

You can use an outboard crossover so you can amp roll, no excuses for the crowd that is afraid of internal amps:

 

@secretguy

For the price of $100K+ I would rather have a matched 7.1.4 system of bryston active speakers with bespoke amps of my choice than a pair of Sonus Fabers and a pair of Macintosh/Audio Research monoblocks, YMMV.

The Bryston Active Mini-T’s aren’t any where near six figures and this is for the entire system and the size makes them ideal for a MCH setup.:

The speakers boast a nearly perfect neutral sonic perspective and this, along with the aforementioned incredible revealing attribute serves to place a well recorded small assemble slightly in front of the system, thus producing a striking ”live” illusion, but without any of the hardness and in-your-face elements, often experienced in systems that project the sound forward.

I found that there is little, if any, way to improve the performance.

http://innerearmag.com/reviews/speakers/Audio_Observer_Bryston_Active_System.shtml