@asctim wrote:
With horn loading the problem is amp hiss gets highly amplified.
Indeed, but using a 16 ohm driver - if available - will help knock down hiss noticeably as well.
@btbluesky wrote:
Amp hiss, is not a normal thing. It’s a product of "too much gain in chain" + "not so good amp". I can crank up to over-concert level, and theres no distortion.
It doesn’t fall back on a "not normal thing" or a "not so good amp." High sensitivity, as has been stated just above, simply amplifies noise. If you removed the passive crossover from your JBL 4367’s and connected your amps directly to the compression drivers, I can assure you hiss would be audible to some degree - and yet your amps are the same; they didn’t suddenly get bad in the absence of passive crossovers (in fact they’d get better).
It’s great though you’ve found a good pairing amp-wise with the JBL’s.
@russbutton --
+1
Another major benefit is that you can use much, much lower powered amps when you use active crossovers. A lot of power is wasted having to push through a passive crossover. You really don’t need to push many watts into a tweeter or mid-range driver to get a lot of level out. You could even run a single ended tube amp on your tweeter, and a mid-level tube power amp on your mid-range driver, and a solid state amp for the bass driver. You have a lot of options.
Options are plentiful, yes. To me though the lesser power needed over the entire frequency range actively would be better served by spreading it out evenly, so to ideally use the same amps top to bottom, or certainly the same amp series/topology with a differentiated power approach for better coherency. To me coherency always comes first, and using similar amps is vital for this to come true in the best way.
