I Was Considering Active, Then I Watched This ...

I used KEF LS50 W2s with a pair of KC62 subs and now use LS60s with the subs in one setup and balanced Ayer gear with KEF Reference 1s in another.  I'm undecided, but I may keep both -- I'll surely keep the LS60s.  I use the actives with the excellent KEF Contact app.  I put my bet on Kal Rubinson's review of the LS60s in Stereophile, and think it's a win.

I worked with active speakers i owned for 10 years...

I bought them 10 years ago because Steve Guttenberg recommended them...

I was very unsatisfied so much i put them for seco0ndary computer use for 10 years , no music...

My life changed, i lost my big speakers, i was alone with headphone which i would modify and with the 4 inches woofer speakers... :)

Now i see it as my best purchase in audio ever...

Why ?

Because active means i only need a low cost tube preamplifier but if i want to have audiophile speakers with this under 150 bucks speakers i must modify them...No speakers designers will design porthole with three feet external tubes behind it ...Most porthole reinforce bass but with great defects because the porthole is designed to please a wife not acoustic...

I did it , story short i add a complex tuned set of tubes to the rear porthole (straws of different lenght and diameter from few inches to three feet and i modified the tweeter waveguide)...

Surprize, surprize: in their acoustic controlled corner these low cost speakers gave me now  natural timbre , bass clear and extended at 50 hertz now and a pin point imaging and a soundstage exceeding the speakers plane in all direction by few feet and encompassing my listener position with sounds coming from the side of me not from the speakers...

The ratio S.Q. price matter...

This set up is unbeatable ...

They beat all my headphones easily save the AKG K340 i modified... Deeper bass to 20 hertz and a soundfield out of my head...

Not bad for 100 bucks vintage TOP headphone and 100 bucks speakers modified now becoming  king in their category ....

Audiophile experience is grounded in knowledge not on price tags...

And as said here  someone who know better than me about speakers :

As some may know, I’m an avid DIYer when it comes to speakers. I’ve built both passive and active and worked with pro sound speakers in theaters. I am ambivalent. That is, I have two strong opinions about each being a good choice.

@erik_squires --

Kudos on your active center channel speaker achievement.

Without getting too much into the alleged technical merits of each design, the thing that passive speakers give me is the ability to chose a very colorful amplifier.

You can do that actively as well, any amp you want. I mean, if you’re going to go active and do the filter settings yourself anyway, I’d say the more compelling route - unless your main objective is to minimize the component count, and insofar you intend to go more all-out with an active approach - is to go outboard active and that way get to choose any of the components as you see fit; power amps, DSP, DAC - that is, any separate outboard component here. No different compared to a passive setup except more amps to the separate driver sections, and a DSP (instead of a passive ditto) to handle filter settings. It’s still, per definition, active configuration, certainly if the filtration is done prior to amplification on signal level.

I just built a fully active, DSP driven center channel. What did I get? Excellent off-axis frequency response and massive dynamic range (comparable to ATC’s claimed figures) in a compact package along with objectively neutral frequency response which doesn’t mind being on a shelf while avoiding the need for yet another amplifier in my rack. Much as I love my Luxman integrated, I keep asking myself if I wouldn’t rather make 2 more active speakers and reduce my combined HT/stereo setup to 1 processor instead.

If you really want to pick your amp, go with passive. If you want to pick a speaker and not have to worry about your amp, go with active, but in no case should you pick speaker A over speaker B based on which of these types they are.

Your premise rests on the notion of limiting active configuration to a bundled solution with plate amps vs. the free choice of any amp passively. As such your "strong opinions" only cover so much of the actual potential of active to make it a worthwhile, more nuanced take comparing it to passive iterations. And that’s just with a center speaker. Imagine taking the next step to the main speakers.

From a certain perspective there’s some merit to your boldfaced part, in that actively the choice amp is less of a deal since the exclusion of a passive filter between amp and speaker frees up the workload of the amp considerably, and thereby maximizes its potential. This shaves off power requirement and harnesses better overall sound quality.
The choice of amp still makes a difference though, and although less so to my ears (compared to passive) it’s still a vital tweaking parameter with outboard active, that actually offers you this opportunity, instead of being stuck with a limited range of plate amps in a bundled solution.

In relation to pre-assembled active speakers the compelling reasons for a manufacturer to go bundled shouldn’t, and couldn’t necessarily apply similarly to the DIY segment. Coming down to it I’ll maintain DIY’ers and manufacturers are limiting themselves with a bundled approach only.

In the consumer world there are a lot of benefits to active speakers we may not care about. Dynamic range and power loss for instance. In the pro world we need every watt, and active crossovers deliver that. In the home world we are fine losing many DB’s of output due to massively overbought amps. 😀 That is, I can point to some technical benefits of active crossovers/speakers which are true, but perhaps irrelevant?

Depends on your benchmark. You want more headroom freeing up the amps (with less distortion to boot) and controlling the drivers more effectively, active makes a significant difference - not only in a pro environment, and not only providing more decibels; sonically, at all levels, the takeaway is there to savor as well.

As a consumer, do you really care that building a DSP crossover is much easier (not easy!) than passive, since we aren’t swapping parts in and out during the prototype phase? Not really. Does the digital time delay and off-axis frequency response matter to you? Most passive speakers do an excellent job with horizontal dispersion. The center I built though needed excellent vertical as well as horizontal dispersion, and that’s a feature I could only really consider in active/DSP configuration. Point is, a lot of the technical differences vanish for most of us.

Apart from the advantages I’ve mentioned earlier, DSP filter parameters with active config. matter a lot to me, also integrating subs. Actually integrating subs without the intricacy of parameters offered by a separate, quality DSP is severely hampered, from my point of view.

Having an active speaker with DSP doesn’t necessarily mean they let you adjust it for your room. You can use the DSP just for the crossover, like you would an active speaker.

This is an important point that I’ve raised quite a few times myself.

@phusis  Thanks, but in the interest of staying with the OP's topic, I'm NOT discussing the use of external crossovers and amps. 

Not only was that not mentioned in his post, but the use of active crossovers and external amps in the home is probably the very rarest of beasts.  I'll happily engage in that topic elsewhere.

Staying in the topic of practical differences between active and passive speakers for the home, I want to talk a little more about my most recent experience.

I have conventional 2-way L and R speakers. I’ve added a 3-way active speaker in the center. The mid-woofers are practically the same but the center uses a different and very highly regarded mid and tweeter. More suitable for the location.

The use of a 3-way amplifier with 50 + 125 + 125 watt sections means I have a theoretical dynamic range of around 1,000 watts. That’s a lot more than my modest Luxman integrated (100W/ch) especially given the losses in the passive crossover due to tweeter/woofer level matching.  Honestly, 20W peaks are VERY LOUD in my home.

So you’d think the center channel blows away the L and R? It does not. It does not sound more dynamic, or louder. It integrates perfectly. What I do get is a fuller bass thanks to having larger woofers than my previous center, and excellent off-axis coverage thanks to the 3-way design, high order crossover and digital time alignment.

What’s my point? That in homes the dynamic range and power calculus often won’t matter to you. Buy what you like and is more convenient.